The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3534 - L.A. Vs ICE, DOGE's VA Disaster w/ Memo Torres & Brandon Roberts

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

We got two great guests for you this hump day. First, we talk to Brandon Roberts, an investigative journalist for ProPublica about the error prone AI program that DOGE implemented to determine Veterans Affairs cuts. We also discuss how FDA cuts have made it difficult to regulate the quality and safety of pharmaceuticals imported from other countries. Then we talk to Memo Torres an award-winning food and lifestyle Journalist and director of L.A. Taco who has been doing incredible work covering ICE's attacks on California. Check out their coverage here: L.A. TACO - Celebrating The Taco Lifestyle in Los Angeles. Also if you are in the LA area and you spot ICE agents in the wild notify L.A. Taco by emailing [e-mail] and they will spread the word. In the fun half we watch Hakeem Jeffries struggle to cope with the idea of getting primaried. Then we check in with Dave Rubin and his old boss, Glenn Beck. They provide some clarity on the future of the Democratic party and their plot to destroy the west. Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Follow us on TikTok here!: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here!: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here!: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here!: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the ESVN YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/esvnshow Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors SHOPIFY: Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/majority   SUNSET LAKE: Use coupon code “Left Is Best” (all one word) for 20% off of your entire order at SunsetLakeCBD.com Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech Check out Matt’s show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon’s show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza’s music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder – https://majorityreportradio.com/  

The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. It is Wednesday, July 9th, 2025. My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, Brandon Roberts, investigative journalist. news application developer at ProPublica

on the failures at the FDA and the munchable parts of the VA also on the program today Memo Torres director of the award-winning street-level journalism

LA Taco they were a taco place and now they're alerting people to what's happening with ice. Also on the program today with over 119 dead 170 still missing in Texas.

Trump flounderingly still wants to slash FEMA. Republicans now teeing up a second bill of cuts for the fall and with the budget deadline looming July 30th Chuck Schumer

now realizing his budget strategy was an abject failure in a shadow docket Supreme Court okays Trump's mass firings of federal workers Russia launches its largest drone attack on Ukraine a day after Trump

reverses Pete Hegsett's unilateral weapons pause. He did it and then forgot about it. Whoopsie. That can happen. Elon Musk's grok goes full Nazi. CEO says, I'm leaving. I'm goose stepping it out of here. Not see you later.

You were waiting on that one. I honestly, it just came to me. That's how brilliant I am. Copper import tax threat. drives prices of copper through the roof. Pam Bondi attacked by Maga over the Epstein saga. Donald Trump administration sues California over allowing transgender athletes in schools. Alligator Alcatraz costed ballooning from $450 to $600 million in less than a month.

lastly trump threatens a 200% tax on imported drugs because why not all this and more on today's majority report welcome ladies and gentlemen well uh it is dropping us right in yep into a hump day hump day Wednesday uh it is Wednesday is hump day Emma Vigland's key phrase. Brian, again, solo today. Matt's back tomorrow, though, right? Tomorrow, thank God. Oh, how you doing? We're chilling.

Everybody could just stop making news for a day. I don't know if Brian was aware of this, but did you know that Emma coined the phrase, Humpty? Really? Yeah. Is this like an Al Gore internet thing? No, yeah.

He actually was a very responsible for him. incident incidentally um we've got a lot to get to this uh next part oh we should also say um well we'll talk about the uh the the the merch sales in the wake of uh of hasan piker being on the program yesterday um turns out he has a large fan base there's a large fan base and um i have several friends who have children who are, you know, between the ages of like 17 and 22. And I now am held in high esteem by those people, whereas two days ago, I could be talking right in front of them and they wouldn't be listening to a word, I would say. They just pretend like it wasn't there.

And I'm including my own daughter and that. Understood. Yeah, he's kind of a big deal, thanks to Hassan for coming on yesterday. Yes, that was fun. even though it was like a hundred degrees oh my god uh it was very uh very high yesterday uh the um the uh i have a little i have struggled a little bit with this story i mean look the epstein thing is intriguing we've never followed it uh covered it um too um too much in depth we've mentioned it from time to time um it is definitely uh there was definitely something incredibly

shady obviously and horrific that went on with Epstein but it is become fascinating to me not that Maga or these right wingers or the Republicans were obsessed with these conspiracies because that's what they do

but that they could be so angry with the Trump administration not the dear daddy Trump but all the people around him they don't care about policy it is all sort of like these weird weird cultural issues there's no policy associated here with it there may be corruption but they don't care about corruption well i mean there's policy if i think my theory and that maybe i cared about the story a little more than you

or followed it more closely just because i think that the theory of him being linked to massad and united States intelligence. Like, this is, I think clearly what happened. I mean, you don't need to believe me on that front, but we'll hear this exchange with Trump and a reporter. It was told reportedly to Alex Acosta that he was an intelligence asset. When he was first caught, he was in this, like, luxury lockup who got, he got to leave on the weekends. And given, like, the scale of the surveillance and recording that he engaged in, that, you know, Bill, he had all these political figures who were embroiled in this, it feels like a honeypot situation, and it's likely both U.S. and Israeli intelligence that had a hand in it. I think that's clear. It's conceivable,

but all of these things we're talking about happened, you know, five, ten years in the past. And it, I mean, that's, that's, it's very possible. But in terms of like, forward-looking policy, there's no implications whatsoever. outside of anything other than as a political matter, it is causing the Trump administration a lot of headaches. And anything in my estimation that causes the Trump administration headaches, that requires them to exert any amount of resources that is not cutting the functioning of government,

that is not cutting the help government provides for people, that is not building a brown shirt, federal secret police squad, essentially, that is not rounding up immigrants, that is not doing any of the horrible things that they do on a day-to-day basis. If they have to spend 15 minutes on dealing with this, it's worth it to talk about. And you know they're worried about it because of how they announce this nonsense, that, oh, there's no, there's no list. Don't worry about it. He killed himself. Don't worry. They dumped it on Sunday night in an item to Axios in between, like, you know. Coming off of the July 4th weekend. And before Netanyahu's visit, which was going to dominate the news cycle on Monday.

So they knew what they were doing. I think they were also trying to avoid talk of this bill that passed. Yeah. With that said, we're, of course, we've been talking about the bill since the past. But here, let's just go back to what Donald Trump Jr. had to say. This is clip number nine. This was last summer, I believe it was. When Donald Trump Jr., was very, very interested in this topic, I don't think he's as interested today, would be my guess.

I'm fine with all the other lists. As long as I'm not on the Epstein list, we're good, right? Speaking of which, how is it that my father can be convicted of 34 crimes, but no one on Epstein's list has even been brought to light. How is, I'm trying to figure out how that's possible, right? It's almost like they're trying to protect those pedophiles for some reason. I can't imagine why, right? I can't imagine why either. Hey, Don, don't talk about that anymore.

And it's just, see, there's, there it is right there. The difference in what I'm saying where, like, like the stuff with aliens, there, They always dance around the conspiracy that is the most likely, which are that, like, say you see a UFO, it's probably some experimental testing for, like, government surveillance or, like, weapons, and they don't want to tell you about it. So they'd rather use to talk about it like it's aliens. And it's similar with this. It's just vague. It's like all anti-Semitism. It's all Hollywood degeneracy as opposed to maybe the more systemic thing you could take away from this is that our intelligence agencies do some really sure.

shady crap, including blackmailing people. And it's quite likely, Epstein was a part of that operation. Here is Donald Trump. We played this yesterday, but we played it in the fun half. And if it wasn't for his response here, I don't know if I would be even remotely interested in this again, because he clearly doesn't want to talk about it. And which is why I think it's healthy to at least keep, throw some chum to the right on this. Your memo and released yesterday in Jeffrey Epstein, it left some lingering mysteries. One of the biggest ones is whether he ever worked for a American or foreign intelligence agency, the former Labor Secretary who was Miami U.S. Attorney Alex Costa, he allegedly said that he did work for an intelligence agency.

So could you resolve whether or not he did? And also, could you say why there was a minute missing from the jailhouse tape on the night of the Senate? Yeah, sure. Did I just enter up for a little second? Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years. You're asking, we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things. And are people still talking about this guy, this creep?

That is unbelievable. Do you want to waste the time, and do you feel like answering? I don't mind answering. I mean, I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein at a time like this where we're having some of the greatest success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration, but you go ahead. Sure, sure. First, to back up on that, in February, I did an interview on Fox,

and it's been getting a lot of attention because I said, I was asked a question about the client list, and my response was, It's sitting on my desk to be reviewed, meaning the file along with the JFK, MLK files as well. That's what I meant by that. Also, to the tens of thousands of video, they turned out to be child porn downloaded by that disgusting Jeffrey Epstein. Child porn is what they were. Never going to be released. Never going to see the lighted day.

To him being an agent, I have no knowledge about that. We can get back to you on that. And the minute missing from the video, we released the video showing definitively the video was not conclusive, but the evidence prior to it was showing he committed suicide. And what was on that, there was a minute that was off the counter. And what we learned from Bureau of Prisons was every year, every night. They redo that video. It was old from like 1999. So every night, the video is reset, and every night should have the same minute missing.

So we're looking for that video to release that as well as showing the minute. You know, it really feels like two things occur to me. One, Trump really didn't want to answer this question or have this question answered. And two, it really doesn't seem like Pam Bondi has done any of the investigation. I mean, if you're asked one question and you literally have to say, well, we're going to look into these three things about the one it doesn't feel like they put their best and brightest on this case here and as far as him wasting time click on that link i just sent you you should probably also turn off the notifications in the in the chat but uh that link at 138 he goes on and talks

for like five minutes in this thing about look at the paintings in here there's all sorts of paintings like wait a second where's the urgency about talking about all the Oh, all the kids? All the kids? That died in Texas? Yeah. I mean. Let's listen.

Let's listen to this. Yeah. Yeah. We got an ad. All right. Here we go. All right. Go to one.

No, no. Hour 38. Are you ready to go on a loan, I think? Yes. You're right. All right. All right. we're we're we're finding it but like that one minute that's missing from the footage that

she addresses there seems pretty relevant to me because that's going out over uh brian we get yeah you can also like make uh it it doesn't prove anything also if he did kill himself because he how did he have the ability to do so when he was such a prize like prisoner who had all of this information and his testimony was going to be so invariable. valuable at the time that's what we were talking about we were talking about what this trial is going to uncover all of this what is he going to be forced to say will he take the stand and then suddenly he had the means to kill himself in the maximum security federal prison that doesn't mean it doesn't need to be an assassin going there and doing it for him it could be a situation where it's

like you're too valuable here's the materials you better do this now that's like what the conspiracy could possibly be as well and she's dancing around that oh my god All right, dancing around it so much here. Just play this. Just go ahead. All right, forget it. Yeah, let's go to the next one. Let's go to number five.

This is how they are freaking out about this. Yeah, so I guess CNN put together this compilation of the right-wing meltdown. And this is an issue that they seem to care about, actually. Although this is supposed to be about the most transparent administration ever. What on earth is going on? Was Pam Bondi said? We're working on it. This is it.

Sorry. Set up by deep state FBI career officials. Is she stupid? Is she so click thirsty that she got out over her skis trying to make news, being a Fox News star? Pam Bonding, all of it. All those videos are saying, yeah, she's seen the videos. It's all coming out. And then now it doesn't exist.

I mean, what? What? The Jeffrey Epstein case. You do not know all the details of this thing, I promise. There are a lot of really obviously powerful people. This part, you know, but the specific names we may not. There were so many individuals that were hidden and kept secret and not been held accountable. What you're going to see hopefully tomorrow is a lot of flight logs, a lot of names, a lot of information.

The DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients? Will that really happen? It's sitting on my desk right now to review. That's been a directive by President Trump. So what happened to the Epstein client list that the Attorney General said she had on her desk? Well, I think if you go back and look at what the Attorney General said in that interview, which was on your network on Fox News. I bet a quote.

John Roberts said, DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients. Will that really happen? and she said it's sitting on my desk right now to review. Yes, she was saying the entirety of all of the paperwork, all of the paper in relation to Jeffrey Epstein's crimes. That's what the Attorney General was referring to, and I'll let her speak for that. This seems like unforgivable behavior. How could she give us those phase one binders that contains nothing while bragging about the cover sheet that she made the most transparent administration in history and tell us that the SDNY had the real goods?

The binder was just proof of a deep state cover up. That was the real story, she told us, only to now say, sorry, there's nothing. If I'm President Trump, I wouldn't tolerate it. Okay. If I'm President Trump, I would be like, thank you. Thank you. I'm happy that they're all got their panties in the bunch over this. The idea that this is Pam Bondi's like sword to fall, I mean.

It's all Pam Bondi. Okay, first of all, why did he appoint Pam Bondi? And if she was aging. She released the Epstein thing. She was age. E.G. from 2011 to 2019, when all this stuff was coming out about Epstein, she didn't do anything about it. Alex Acosta, previous labor secretary, mentioned there, picked by Donald Trump. Trump was friends with Epstein. By his own words, Epstein said Trump was my best friend for, I don't know how long. There was photos of them. He was on the plane. When Galane Maxwell got locked up, he said, I wish her well. And again, who was president? when Epstein died. Trump and all of MAGA, because this is a cult,

they have to pretend like Trump is somehow not complicit in this whole situation when he's the one who has the most direct ties to Epstein of anybody in the cabinet, of anybody in the cabinet. If MAGA is serious about this, they should be calling for Pam Bondi's resignation so that Donald Trump can release these documents. Clearly, she's hiding them from Trump. Trump is most incredibly powerful.

and also a victim of everybody around him. I asked Bondi. I said release the documents, and she wouldn't do it. And what? I don't know. And now I can't, the office is locked.

So, whoopsie. Honestly, it would be a good thing if she got fired, because it would be difficult for them to replace the AG, and it would cause, again, anything that causes. any use of resources that is not, you know, level that destroying our government is a good thing. In a moment we're going to be talking to Brandon Roberts, investigative journalists and news application developer ProPublica, about two stories Brandon's written about the Trump administration destroying our government.

In one instance, the VA, the other, the FDA's capacity to inspect drugs that come in from overseas. I think about 40% of our prescription drugs do come from overseas. We'll talk to Brandon about that in a moment. Yesterday, we had Hassan Piker on. Yeah. And we got a new hat. It's a max left trucker's hat. We're also going to get some, I think, some dad hats in.

the same uh type of logo um but when we started this podcast i was very very reluctant to do a merch store because i'm like this is going to be a hassle uh i don't want to be i don't it's it's going to be too complicated uh we just couldn't do it and uh because i just have too many things on my plate just every day there's something on my plate i'm talking metaphorically I'm talking about the news. And it became, like, then people were like, you've got to have a merch store. Well, thank you to Shopify.

Nice. Yesterday, we sold, like, I don't know, 70 hats of that max left. People love those. And we couldn't do it without Shopify. Shopify's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. Things like Magic Spoon, the brand's just getting started to our own merch store

Shopify has hundreds of ready-use templates to help you build an online store that matches your brand that can be beautiful, edgy, or minimalist or completely underdeveloped like ours. Shopify is packed with AI tools that help you put together product descriptions, page headlines, even enhance your product photography.

And best yet, Shopify helps you with managing inventory, shipping, processing, returns, and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Shopify also integrates your, you know, if you do a live show, well, if you have a shop that's live, but for us, it's, you know, when we do a live show, integrates it with inventory and expenses and all in one place. You can also put it on all different types of social media.

It's been great. Super easy. And, of course, if we have Hassan on again and you have him do another piece of wear another piece of our merch uh we can actually easily scale up uh and get ready for that kind of uh turn your big business idea into a chatching with shopify on your side sign up for your one dollar per month trial start selling at shopify dot com slash majority go to shopify dot com slash majority uh and um we have all that info in the podcast and youtube description check it out in a moment we'll be right back with brandon roberts investigative journalist at pro publica

Thank you. We are back, Sam Cedar, Emma Vigland, on The Majority Report. It's a pleasure to welcome to the program, Brandon Roberts, investigative journalists and news application developer at ProPublica. Brandon, thanks for joining us. We've got two stories that you've written over the past month that I'm interested in. uh the first is what's been going on at the VA there was a big story at the VA about how uh doctors were essentially allowed to decide that if they have religious objections to treating some of the patients there that's no big deal feel free to ignore them if you don't like their politics

or uh their sexual orientation or anything like that which is completely bad crap crazy in my mind but the piece you wrote was specifically about how Doge came in and decided to, I don't know, it's almost willy-nilly, but they sort of pretend it's not to just like start cutting. Right, exactly. Yeah, so the story goes, there's this Doge guy, Sahelivinia. he shows up to work at VA as part of Doge and essentially

Where do you come from? Where do you come from? He's a background in tech So he's done startups His startup gum road has been around for a long time He's got a blog where he talks about it But it was like a large regular startup That was raising money, hiring people

Then it all kind of fell apart And then he sort of figured out How he could go without employees and use AI and automation to kind of run his company. So it's a very small thing. But he's, you know, that's like part of his success story is that he's used AI to, you know, continue this company that would have otherwise failed. And he kind of brought that approach over to VA.

Day one, he gets asked, hey, we have this executive order. We need to go through all of VA's contracts and grants. We need you to go through the approximately, you know, 90,000 or so contracts, figure out which ones we can cut. um you know and do it in 30 days which is a very fast you know that's an impossible deadline is what saha told me um to him the natural and just sit on that for one second and realize just how insane of a task that is the idea that none of these contracts to assess these contracts you need to have exactly zero understanding of the largest government agency or enterprise that exist.

I mean, the VA is basically running almost like a small country, right? I mean, it's like we're talking about not just health insurance. We're talking about hospital services. We're talking about social services. We're talking about employment services for millions of people. And it's one of the most complicated agencies that we have. And a dude who comes in who did a processing, like basically an e-commerce site comes in and it has 30 days to make a determination on 90,000 contracts. Like I wouldn't even trust that person or anybody, for that matter, to do an assessment on a contract.

Right. And, you know, Sahel, the Doge engineer, you know, he would be the first to, you know, kind of agree with that. You know, his no background in this, they asked him to do it, and he was going to do it. So in his mind, the only way to do this was use AI. And what, like, in the piece, you write out, I guess, the script that he used or the, I mean, what, so he uses A. to do to do what I how would AI have this level of knowledge about what the VA does specifically I mean is that possible or what would you have to input into it

right well there's a couple things so what we received from a source is like his code which includes prompts the prompts are instructions given to AI and it's explaining to AI how to determine whether or not something is munchable

and munchable means something that we can cancel that is a contract that is not going to affect patient care. The way that they define that is very, very kind of somewhat contradictory and just very verbose and complicated. And it also has a huge assumption that like support roles won't, you know, cutting a support role won't have any impact on patient care. That's what AI was given. there's two problems with this. One is like the prompt is super long and like convoluted and it uses a lot of vague definitions. Like if the price seems unreasonable,

like things like that where the AI just has to guess. But also the data it was given, like the contracts it was given, the contract text, usually there's only a sentence in there describing what the contract is. So there's just not a lot of information being provided to a, you know,

to a human or to AI to figure this out. I talked to numerous experts about this. You know, experts in AI, they were like, this is possible, but not this way. They thought it was ridiculous and just incompetent, honestly. A lot of them thought that. And they just got the sense that whoever was doing it didn't really know what they were doing. I mean, it seems to me that like it's almost, it's completely backwards. You don't need an expert in AI to do this.

You need an expert in the VA to then. maybe take a 30-day course on how to write prompts in AI because you can't write a prompt if you don't you can't possibly know the right questions to ask even if AI is all knowing you can't know you can't possibly know the questions to ask unless you understand what the how the VA works I mean this is just so insane to me it's crazy so they go about this how much gets cut and like what kind of stuff gets cut and what's the state of that stuff right so it's a little unclear um the democrats uh the like the minority VA um oversight they have been asking for like a list of things that were cut and why and VA has not given that

to them um we can see in USA spending which is like the government kind of catalog of contracts we can see, you know, I think like 900 have been cut that we can see, but that doesn't give us the reasoning. In addition to the code that we received from a source with, you know, the AI script, all that code, we also got like a list of outputs. So it's like the contract, the contract description, and then whether or not AI thought that it should be canceled. So using this, we can kind of get a sense for it, but we don't really know what's going

on inside VA as far as contracts go. press them and we just don't VA knows? I mean, so we talk to people inside VA and, you know, like there are people in the VA who are experts in these contracts.

You know, there's contracting officers who know the contract better than anyone else. And even they were kind of like confused about what's going on. Or they would be given like, hey, we got to cancel this one. And then it would be uncanceled or, you know, they didn't really know who was kind of making the overall decisions or why things were cut so just like a lot of chaos internally is kind of the sense we got from sources at VA and so we don't really have any sense of like what has been lost or in terms of in terms of the dollar amount or the functioning so we have we have a list of things that were cut whether or not they were directly cut because of this AI program we are not sure there was like many rounds of things that were cut at VA but some things that were cut that were also flagged by AI you know it's like a gene sequencing machine that some extras told us could be used for like cancer treatments you know there's there was like a suicide prevention hotline that got cut you know there's a there's a there's a wide

variety of things, probably like the most common kind of cut is like recruitment of nurses or like ensuring that, you know, the staff there are getting support for, you know, PTSD or whatever else. And I'll remind you that, you know, a large percentage of VA staff are veterans themselves. So, you know, VA takes care of veterans and the employees are veterans. So these programs that are intended to help the employees there are also helping veterans. All right. Let's go to your second piece. Yeah, I know. Let's just put his audio up just another hair. I know I know we went down, but it's a little bit too much. Let's go to your second piece on the FDA. It feels like, I mean, do we even have a timeline of when I guess there'll be, I mean, Republicans aren't interested in any type of oversight of this.

We just won't know, right? In terms of, like, the exemptions to the bans or what do you? Just the dollar amounts, like, or what, you know, we have no, there's no way to get a sense of, like, what was, you know, what was, you know, what was the implications of being cut are? For VA contracts. Yeah. Yes. I mean, we talked to the press secretary. Pete Kasferowitz, and he told us everything goes through manual review and nothing will be cut.

You know, that isn't just fat, essentially. And a lot of this stuff, we're not going to see the effects of it until, you know, down the road. You know, there's a hiring freeze. Contractors do a lot of important jobs at VA and all government agencies. So the thought that this isn't going to have any impact and like veterans receiving care at VA are not going to see this, A lot of people we talked to thought that was ridiculous, but, you know, like with any kind of downsizing or riff or cutting stuff, the effects are not immediately felt usually. So we're going to see, you know, and we're going to keep reporting. So people who are at VA, you know, we're still talking to them.

We're still figuring out what's happening. We're tracking this carefully. All right. Let's turn to another thing. Donald Trump just yesterday, I guess, threatened to levy a 200% import tax on drugs that are coming into this country. The, that's one problem, that it could be incredibly expensive to get those drugs. The other problem is that they seem to, the Trump administration is also simultaneously rolled back the

inspector structures that we have in place and safeguards to make sure that those drugs that are being imported are safe walk us through that first let's just start what percentage of drugs in this country are imported i do not have a percentage on that um like with anything drugs it's it's kind of hard to get data about you know the market or whatever FDA doesn't make this stuff available but you know, a large percentage of all prescriptions are generic. I'm sure anyone who has filled a prescription has probably gotten a generic because it's usually much cheaper and that's what your insurance will, you know, will pay for. We also know that a lot of generic drugs are made overseas. So it is a significant portion. My understanding, I think I saw like around 40%

when these things, but let's assume it's, it's greater than zero. It's certainly greater than 10 or 20 percent. And it's probably less than 50 percent. So we're talking about a significant amount of drugs that are taken by Americans. And what, how are these, like, you know, how does the FDA generally make sure that these drugs are safe if they're, you know, manufactured in other countries? Right. So like the primary thing that they do is they go and they inspect, they send inspectors overseas to these facilities and they check them for all. kinds of things. You know, sometimes it comes back good.

Sometimes they find that, like, they've been destroying records or that, you know, there's mold or, like, contaminants and, like, they find all kinds of issues. The inspector then can issue a recommendation about what can happen, but the inspector does not get to say what happens there. It is up to FDA to decide what do we do once we've identified these issues, and that is what our investigation looks at. And what did you find in terms of, like, the FDA's capacity to ensure that these drugs are being made in, like, a safe manner?

Right. Well, we identified multiple manufacturers of drugs who had been cited over and over. So FDA knew that there were problems with these facilities, and meanwhile, they continued, need to grant them more approvals to create new generics, and they also granted them exemptions. So when an inspector goes and finds issues at a facility, the FDA will then sometimes issue an import ban, meaning no drugs from this facility are allowed to enter the U.S. But what they will do is they will sometimes exempt certain drugs. So if there's a shortage or there's a number of reasons, but they will exempt certain drugs from the ban.

So you could be getting drugs that come from these facilities that potentially have, you know, contaminants or whatever issues, and you're going to pick it up. That is a definite possibility and that, you know, people we've talked to suspect that happened in a lot of their cases. And in my understanding is, how much, how many of these inspectors, have been fired uh in the i guess the six months of the uh trump administration and um tell us about the dynamic of you could keep uh inspectors but if you don't have their support staff it doesn't matter right um like i don't i don't have the number on exact number of inspectors fired but you know

it is a very complicated thing because it feels like they fire you know 300 people then they realize like oh we can't manage without those 300 people let's hire back 75 of them and then 50 are still available and the other 25 are like i'm not coming back are you kidding like there's no job security right exactly yeah um but getting numbers on us is hard but like you know anecdotally we know you know people are leaving and a lot of them have critical roles and you know some like the uncontrolled nature of this buyout anyone can leave so like an entire age an entire office can leave and they have no way to be like well actually we need we need that office so like only like 20% can leave no there's no controls on this so that is why I think you know we're

seeing this rehiring which is like incredibly wasteful people leaving they decide they need them then they have to rehire a lot of these people are on administrative leave meaning we are paying them to do nothing and then also we're short staffs and then you know also hiring So it is not an efficient strategy for, you know, downsizing government, if that even is the goal. I mean, it feels like the one through line between the story about the VA and the story about the FDA is that people are making crucial decisions without any information about what they're talking about. Like, without any knowledge, I mean, it's conceivable to me that you could be an expert at the FDA and go in and go, like, you know what, there's 10% fat here because I've been working here for an X amount of years, and I can see there's a redundancy here that we don't need. We may need the redundancy over there, but if we cut 10% here and add 5% there, there's a 5% savings, I mean, this is all theoretical. but if you don't have an understanding of what the critical mission activities are and how

they work, there's no way you can do this. And if you haphazardly just say, whoever wants to leave and get bought out, gets bought out, you don't have a sense of like, are we losing the, you know, it's one thing to say on your car, like, you know what, I don't need the racing stripes. It's another just to say, like, take off whatever it is you need to take off. And you come back and there's no engine. right exactly and it's really interesting um you know there's a notable case of uh CMS um whichever sees Medicaid and the Doge people who showed up there had ties at working at that agency and the cuts

were very very small um so you know the more knowledge they have you know oftentimes the less they cut um saw Hill the the Doge VA coder you know he showed up expecting there to be tons of waste fraud and abuse and it'd be really easy to find this stuff And he was surprised. He didn't really find any. So it's, you know, government is complicated. Government is big. But like downsizing government, it's not a tech problem.

It's fascinating stuff, Brandon. And I imagine the story that we're seeing at like the FDA and we've seen at the VA is probably also the story of what's going on at the National Weather Service and at FEMA and at all these agencies are facing. the same challenges to actually do anything. And I don't know that, frankly, at the end of the day, beyond the blowback that they're going to get in terms of these services failing people when they're needed, that they really care.

But Brandon Roberts, we will put a link to both those pieces at ProPublica. Thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Thanks, thanks for having me. Thanks, Brandon. All right, we're going to take quick break when we come back, Mamo Torres, director of the award-winning street-level journalism outlet L.A. Taco, which also is a taco outlet. I don't know.

So, you know, and to do you know, You know, I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. We are back, Sam Cedar, Emma Vigland on The Majority Report. It's a real pleasure to welcome to the program, MMO Torres, director of the award-winning street-level journalism outlet, L.A. Taco. Memo, thanks for joining us.

How did you start this journalistic project? Well, I came on board in 2019. L.A. Tacos started off as a blog in 2005, 2006, mostly focused on, like, weed, graffiti, and tacos. And then in 2018, when LA Weekly got bought by billionaires and then they fired all their staff, we kind of, the co-founders felt there was a void here for, like, you know, some alternative street-level news. So Ali Tocco already kind of having a follow and relaunched as a publication with the help of Danny Hernandez, who's now the food editor over at L.A. Times. I knew Daniel, so I kind of started helping out, and one thing that's another, and now we're here. So we've been covering journalism in Los Angeles now for about six years since like 2018, seven years. Yeah, it's been a minute.

But yeah, we've been covering, you know, the police, you know, local politics, art, culture, and food, which especially includes tacos. And my understanding is that you guys have obviously in the way. of what's been going on with ICE over the past several months have basically dedicated a lot of your resources to becoming almost like a clearing

house for reports on what ICE is doing. Yeah, I mean, we kind of found ourselves at an intersection here of ICE attacking specifically communities we cover. We pride ourselves in covering all of LA, especially parts that kind of get overlooked by larger media outlets, which is where ICE is really

attacking. They're also attacking a lot of the street vendors, which is something that we specialize in covering. So we kind of found ourselves in this position to, you know, really know and have connections all over LA and being able to talk effectively about all the situation and cover it really well. So, you know, yeah. You won awards previously I was seeing for your food journalism And that, like, that combination of kind of being embedded in the community, I feel like, and covering L.A. the way you do, probably puts you in a unique position right now because, you know, frankly, we're still not seeing the national coverage, I think, that is, like, requisite to meet the moment of what's happening in L.A. right now. What I'm hearing from my friends out there is that it is a horrifying scene and that there are folks who are, afraid to go out in public, uh, and communities are ghost towns at the moment because everyone's afraid of this ice Gestapo ruining their lives and tearing their family apart. Yeah, it's, it's really, I mean, it's almost like a cleansing of our communities in a way,

because the, the, the amount of street vendors that are out is, is down way low. Um, I, at least half the street vendors are gone, if not more. Um, um, Communities that are largely Hispanic are really being at heart economically. People don't want to go out on the streets. People are ordering food, picking up to go. They're getting taken when they're trying to go to the market. They'll follow them to the market parking lots and take it from the market parking lots when they're trying to get food. Gardners are being taken off the streets, street vendors, people from bus stops.

People at the bus stops just trying to go to work are getting taken by ice. it's a frightening situation for a lot of the communities, especially Latino communities in Los Angeles. Okay. Sorry, we're just getting some sound issues again. We're working on that. Give us a sense of like what, you know, how much was the communities that you cover

and report on now and just were obviously embedded in? how prepared were they for for this i mean in the wake of the the the the the is there a level of sort of like surprise or were people sort of gearing up for something like this no i don't think anybody expected this to happen i mean you know trump had talked about going after the violent criminals right um he didn't ever talk about going after people at their workplaces people people at the courthouses, people trying to sell food on the streets, people mowing lawns. There was never any discussion of that.

So people were vastly unprepared and it was completely unexpected. To the point where you have, you know, a lot of people that had voted for Trump being like, whoa, this is not what we voted for. You know, there's a lot of backlash towards fellow Latinos that voted for Trump. I think when it all happened, it was June 6th. And it started off with the first ice raid in the garment district at an apparel company. And that just kind of sent shockwaves because the way they came in hard, fast, took, I don't know, like 20 or 30 something people, people came out to immediately on the streets to confront them. One person got in front of a minivan, an ice agent driving a minivan with people in it.

He drove, just hit the gas pedal, almost ran him over, knocked the guy back on his head. I luckily survived, but just we've seen reckless behavior and actions from ICE Border Patrol, wherever these messages are. How is it, do you think, that that that was the understanding that that was what Trump was going to do? I'm just curious as like, because, I mean, look, you know, we do this every day. We spend three hours a day. We're covering this campaign. and so, you know, the level, we're seeing the signs that say mass deportations. And your average person who is not in the business of doing political news, they don't necessarily, you know, people go and vote and maybe they tune in two weeks beforehand.

But how prominent was like right wing or Trump-oriented media or advertising? hitting the communities that you deal with? I mean, I don't think there was, like I said, I don't think people really expected this level of attacks. When people, I mean, we, like, for example, we knew that this was going to come. Something was coming down the pipeline in November, December, And as a newsroom, we were planning, okay, let's plan on spreading information and building resources on what your rights are if ICE shows up at your door, you know, what to do, who to call, what organizations to call or support, and just kind of get people prepared, like, with their legal knowledge of how to react, you know.

And what we've seen is we've seen ICE and Border Patrol just kind of like throw legalities out the window. Right. there's no due process there's no Miranda rights there's no identifying themselves so the preparation was for something that was going to be on a legal term what we're seeing here is complete just Wild West over here with these guys but I guess what I'm trying to get at is like you know for those people who voted for Trump and and they're now like holy crap this is this is not what I bargained for I'm curious as to like what was driving their interest in Trump and where they were getting whatever information they were getting from.

And we saw, and I think the polling shows that, like, a lot of that support is cratering, you know, not and, you know, across the country from Latino voters. But we also saw, I mean, there's some reports that he nearly got a majority of Latino voters, like me, you know, well into the 40s. And I'm just curious as like how that happened when this happens six months later. You know what I mean? Well, I mean, look, I think, first of all, I think people are, we shouldn't still fixate the Latino voters as to like one monolith. Right.

One monolith. That's true. Right. Yeah, no, there's spread out. Like, if you look at Cubans in Florida, they were highly supportive of Trump versus like Mexicans in Los Angeles, which were highly against Trump. Yeah. I mean, Cuban, in Florida, they always tend to vote a Republican because of the relationship between Cuba and the United States and the people who end up leaving Cuba tend to be, you know, more anti-communist, more, you know, or, you know, I mean, that's almost, there's a certain sort of like class associations, if not actually, like, material issues that come from there. So, I mean, that's a unique case.

But the, you know, if Trump is getting that close with the Latino vote, it's not because of Florida, Cubans of Florida. It's another thing going on. Well, I think, well, there's also the religious factor. A lot of Latinos, especially Mexicans, are hard Catholics. So they'll vote their religion. So issues like abortion, for example, is a huge one. That one issue will get Trump a lot of Latino votes because they're super Catholic.

they're anti-abortion. They'll vote according to whichever party represents their religious beliefs. That's one huge one. It doesn't mean that works across the board, though. But as far as, like, I can't speak for everybody and where they got their information and where they went towards. But people that I did speak with, I've had some distant family members.

I had a reunion recently I was speaking with. A lot of them, honestly, just greedy. They thought they'd get better benefits. They'd think they'd make more money. They'd pay less taxes. A lot of it was just financial-based. People thought they'd be better off. They get fooled into the whole, you know, like, oh, taxes are higher now without realizing

it's Trump's tax plan still, you know, so screw by it. And we want Trump. And that's kind of been the common theme I've seen from a lot of people. Cost of living. It was here in New York. I mean, Zora Mamdani got on the scene interviewing folks who were largely immigrant populations about why they voted for Trump or why they stayed home. And some of these people are like in AOC's district and split their vote on that front.

And they were saying it was cost of living. And like that that completely seems to track, at least for me, with a lot of some of the working class support that he picked up. What's really, you know, troubling for me to see, at least observe from the other side of the country, is it appears like ICE and correct me if I'm wrong. They're targeting street vendors specifically in L.A. Other jobs, we're hearing talk about raids on construction sites, and I think farm workers are, we're about to get into a really important season for harvesting, and there's concern that people aren't showing up for those jobs. What are you seeing in L.A. in terms of, like, the communities and the people in certain occupations who are most affected? by what ICE is doing.

Well, from what I'm observing is, ISIS basically, they're going out without warrants, so they're attacking people that are most vulnerable, and those people that are most vulnerable are in public spaces, right? They're the day laborers in the parking lots. They're the street vendors on the street. There are people exposed working at car washes.

So ICE is really just going after people that are out there and exposed. They're rarely, you rarely see them going into actual buildings, although recently they started getting a little more bold than going into actual home depots instead of just the parking lots. I saw a couple of instances where they go into car washes and go to the back offices. And they're getting a little bit more bold there.

And I think it's important for those kind of businesses to understand their rights so that they can stop it. But you have to stop them because they know ICE knows that they're not allowed back there. But they'll go wherever they go until somebody actually gets in front of them and asserts their rights and says, no, this is a private room. I need a warrant. You can't go back there. and that does work but you just need somebody who's brave enough to assert that so for the most part what ice is doing is like yeah they see gardeners on the sidewalk you know working you know mowing the lawn in the front of a house or an apartment building or whatever it be trimming trees in a parking lot so they're literally just going after anybody that's exposed out in public areas um what's happening in terms of like the lAPD uh and and and you know to the extent that you're aware of other uh police forces too like Where is, what is your sense of what's happening with the dynamic between the localities and the ice? I mean, I think I just saw a piece that you wrote the Daily Memo on, on a mayor who very aggressively, I can't remember the town off the top of my head now.

Bill Gardner. Yeah, very aggressively. you know basically he's keeping ice out or attempting to what give me your sense of like what's happening in there and if there are if the political winds are shifting and you know i noticed karen bass got out to the mccarthy park pretty quickly seemingly more aggressive than she was i want to say like three four weeks ago yeah so it's it's a L.A is so huge right and we have so many cities in the county of Los Angeles. And we have neighborhoods. We have, it's a complicated situation.

So the power that like the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, has or doesn't have, other smaller cities can assert more, right? For example, you've had the mayor of Huntington Park who immediately pushed for a policy instructing his local police to, you know, identify masked agents to pull over, you know, vehicles without any plates and identify them verify and identify right it's not going to do much other than like make sure there's no impostors and they did in fact catch one imposter um he was loaded with weapons he had the blue and red lights um he had the whole gear on so they did catch one imposter and hunted to park next to that policy um that's bill gardens can i just say like that's

nuts because there's not any places doing that and if they're finding a guy with that kind of stuff. This must be going on all across the state. They're trying to get, they're incentivizing kidnapping. That's what this administration's doing. Yeah. There's reports of people getting kidnapped or ransoms. There was another incident where a mother

was taken by somebody that's masked up. The report is that KTLA5 covered this really well, was that the woman was being held at a warehouse down by the border in San Diego with a bunch of other detainees

and they were trying to force her to self-deport. Now, they contacted ICE. They got a statement from the PR person over at ICE, and I said, basically, this fabricated story, this bizarre tale is clearly made up. We never arrested this woman. We're not holding her down at a warehouse. Without any concern as to, like,

well, let us look into it. Is there maybe an imposter trying to do our job? No, they're just like, you guys are fabricating tales and just dismissed it. So it's like, so then, who did take her, right? Like, because she's gone. And ISIS is denying taking her. They can't locate her. But, yeah, you do have these situations.

So sorry. Yeah. No, I just, this is just so important, I think, for people to grasp. Like, part of what is so scary about what's happening right now is that it's the Wild Wild West to a degree where there are Latino, our neighbors, our friends, they can't call the police or they don't want to call the authorities or even draw attention to their story from a member of the media or something like that because they are fearful that it's going to attract more and more attention. And so everything we're hearing, at least from a national news perspective, seems to me that

it's just the tip of the iceberg because the chilling effect that this has downstream for everybody. Yes. It's definitely the tip of the iceberg. And it's hard. I come, I get so many tips. I get so many videos. It's hard to verify a lot of them. And some of them we can't. share because people just want to inform us and let us know what's happening, but it's, it's really sad. It's really sad. People need to understand it. We're completely being terrorized in the Latino communities. It's, it's really, it's a really scary situation. You're having situations where kids are going out to take over their mom or their grandma's old Tamales stand on a corner because their grandma got up ducked by ice the week before, but they need to make

some money and pay some bills. They can't find them in the meantime, you know. ICE isn't really reporting on who they're taking, where they're taking them. So it's taking people an average of like two days, sometimes weak or more, to find where their relatives who got taken. They don't know where they are. They're being held in the infamous B-18, the basement of the federal building right here in downtown L.A.

B-18 is the basement area where they're just cramming people in there. reports are like 20 to a room with like one bucket as a toilet getting them water and crackers once a day not letting them see their lawyers lawyers are out there for a whole day waiting to see clients without any access give up and have to leave it's really a horrific situation of i think people understand that i think that and another thing is that they think people are actually getting caught and deported you you look down at the you look down at the newspapers in mexico and they're they're asking right they last week they started asking well where are all the deportees we were supposed to be getting this influx of thousands of deportees where are they well look at delanto

they're all getting jail look at alcatraz uh alligator alcatraz there's too much money to be made exactly there's too much money to be made in these detention centers there's 600 million uh for this detention center in uh florida there is no incentive of structure to do anything other than to keep them in these detention centers, and they won't end up being deported anywhere until these detention centers are filled up. That's the way this is going to work, because somebody's making, I don't know, $450 bucks a day per detainee that's there. And then it wouldn't surprise me down the road that, I mean, we're already hearing reports is my understanding is that there's attempts by ICE now to isolate people.

that they've picked up, offer them $1,000 to self-deport, and getting them to sign off on waiving all of their rights. And then we just don't know what happens after that, because there's no way that people are going to go, like, wait, where's my $1,000? Wait, well, you're not sending me anywhere. For all we know, they end up in a detention center. Exactly. Here in Kern County, just the county next to us to the north, they're about to convert this facility with like 2,100-something beds into one of the largest detention facilities in California.

I mean... Like, why do they need more detention facilities if they're supposedly deporting? They could theoretically just say everybody on a bus, we're just going to go across the border. Exactly. Have you heard any reports of, I mean, I think

we're probably, it's too early in this process, but the idea of like, you know, detainees in these uh essentially what amounts to a concentration camps at this point um because you know i don't know why we say detainee it's i guess it's a you know sort of a a more genteel a word in some way but at one point there's no reason to believe that ice isn't going to go to these uh uh people in these concentration camps and work out the same sort of

like dynamic we see with some prisons down south where it's like if you want to get out of here you need to go work in these factories like somebody's going to have to fill these jobs whether they're in uh you know we just had the uh the the secretary of agriculture say like well you know people in medicaid can take these jobs i guess that uh we're missing well that's not going to happen everybody knows that's not going to happen these jobs are going to have to be filled and the idea of like, well, you know, pick some almonds for us and then, you know, for free and then we'll let you go in three months. I mean, to what extent are people like sort of like, you know, now with this greater awareness

of how bad it can get, are people starting to sort of like speculate about where this goes? Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I can't speak this to the people's awareness out there. But what I do know is I'm often in shocked. People reach out to me from all over, from London, from Canada, from other parts of the states, Illinois. I mean, I get people from all over the world that reach out to me, other news organizations, even from people in our corporate media world.

I have, you know, I won't say names, but they reach out to me. They're like, we can't believe what we're seeing out over Alated Taco and the coverage you guys are doing. And to me, that baffles me, that people don't understand the level, the seriousness that it's happening here in Los Angeles because they don't see it anywhere else. You know, they're not seeing it on BBC. They're not seen it in corporate media. They're not, and it's like, like, people always tell us, like, you guys are at the forefront. You guys are leading this. It's like, why is a little taco publication at the forefront of this? Why isn't everybody talking about this?

It's frustrating. It's like, great. We get praise. We're on the Washington Post. We're on NPR. And they're like, yeah, you guys are doing a great. great job. I was like, why aren't you? Why isn't everybody else doing this? Like, why do we have to be working? I'm working like 14 hour days trying to cover everything and I can't cover

everything. Our team is working their butts off. And luckily we have at least coming out and supporting us in droves. We've had fundraisers. Eva Longoria dropped the money, a match. And you know, we have a lot of support and we're really grateful and thankful. But at the same time, this isn't something that we want praise for. This is something we want more people to cover and understand what's happening. Sorry. little wrap there. No, I mean, I think that is, that is, I mean, that is a crucial element of this dynamic, because I think it's also indicative of like, you know, at these, uh, um, mainstream publications, the, they, they cater to, you know, what is going to make them money. And, uh, it's not necessarily covering a, uh, you know, a population that is, you know, sort of on the margins. you know from their perspective anyways and it's a huge problem

because I don't think that people understand the scope of what's going on at this point and it's only going to get worse I mean we're talking about 10,000 do you guys have a notion of you know being so close to this like who are these ICE agents because the next round of 10,000 of them

you know as far as like to the extent that I've you know, no people who have dealt with these folks, you know, had direct contact. It tends to either be sort of like vets who have left the military early or people who couldn't become cops or bounty hunters who want to get a little more official. And I can't imagine, you know, I don't know if it's going to end up being prison guards or what, like, there's going to have to be, I mean, I don't know. What type of mentality you have to be in to be in this kind of work, as it were. But I got to imagine we're going to start scraping the bottom of the barrel of those people, and that's not going to be very pretty. I mean, they just got the, we already know about the budget increase, right?

They're going to be the third largest military force in the world behind the U.S. and China. They're going to start hiring agents from everywhere. And right now what we're seeing is we see a lot of plates from Texas and Arizona, you know, those hard-line red states. They're the ones coming over here to terrorize Los Angeles. I've been hearing reports of people that are prison guards getting contracted out. I've been seeing a lot of that. It's difficult to confirm any of that because they're not identifying themselves. You don't know who they are, where they come from.

It's speculation at this point, but we are seeing a lot of Texas and Arizona plates here. And where are they going to get the new workforce? right? They're going to build, they're going to expand ice. And in my theory, they're going to go after our local police officers. They're going to go after the prison guard. You know, they're going to go after vets. They're going to hire people out of the military.

And they're going to convert those forces into ice. That's where I'm putting my money on. And I think that's going to happen because what we see in Los Angeles, you kind of asked this question, but we didn't really talk about like the LEPD and the local police, how we see them interacting with ice. I mean,

they all feel like they're all like, you know, birds of a feather. They see each other as police. You know, they all think they're all in the same team. We've seen reports. I've seen them by Dodger Stadium where they park outside of Dodger Stadium to kind of like meet up in the morning. There's a police academy there and there's LAPD presence there. I've seen them wave at each other.

Like, hey, how are you doing? I saw a video that Kalo News shared where a sheriff, a nice agent, went into the sheriff's office. And they caught on video where the sheriff were like, hey, we're glad to see you here. You know, like, they're birds of a feather. They, they, and what we saw at the, at the protests here, the No Kings Day and even the protest, it was like nice straight day of protests here in Los Angeles. What we saw is that it was almost like LAPD and the sheriffs were trying to like show off

to ice. Like, you know, we can handle this crowd and they went nuts, tear gas, rubber bullets, just attacking the crowds. It was almost like, you know, they're measuring their carrot sticks out there. so that's what we see you know it's like it's hard to depend on the local police force and then not to put a blanket on every single police officer but as an agency they do see themselves as birds of a feather that's that's at least our perception of it what um uh and i i imagine you know what what what what happens in california's not going to stay in

california i mean i think new york is going to be next on the list frankly um but from from from your perspective what are things that we should be preparing for both in terms of like folks who are in the community and also just even from the perspective of like a small media outlet you know somewhat similarly situated to yours uh without the the food expertise um uh but what what would you recommend or what what kind of advice would you give us look I would recommend everybody be ready to document first and foremost document be out there with your phones keep your distance don't interfere but document document and share this is important it might not help now but it helped later and at least it kind of lets people know as to what tactics they're doing right like in Los Angeles we've seen a little bit of change of tactics like they'll go out in construction uniforms they're little dressed like their day laborers go to a Home Depot parking lot and just kind of wait until there's enough you know day laborers show up and then they'll call it in and they'll come and raid the place we see things like that right oh so they're basically using like honey pots guy shows up in a pickup

looks like he's got a job site waits for half a dozen or a dozen guys to come over and start saying like okay i need uh you know three guys to do framing i need and i don't know if they're actually going and like calling it's kind of like go and hang out there you know what i'm saying they're not really approaching them um but they're starting to send out spotters that's for sure. We're seeing reports of ICE agents going out and just kind of spotting, taking pictures and reporting, and then moments after that, you'll see like a wave of trucks come in. I recommend people also mask up, honestly. They're starting to use facial recognition. Anytime observers come out, so like in Los Angeles, there's a good rapid response network. There's like 1,200 people in a rapid response network. It's really complicated. It's really well organized. So when people call, these numbers. It goes through the channels and then they get the closest local people to go out to like a Home Depot. Hey, I so spot it here, go verify. So what they're starting to do, they're starting to go after these observers, you know, and they're starting to take pictures of them.

They're using facial recognition on their phone. The ICE agents are doing this. So be careful with their identities because they were starting to see moments of retaliation here and there. yesterday in bad nights they took four people accused them of trying to sabotage their tires with with some nails um so be careful with that i say protect your identities protect your faces if you're going to be doing that um it's it's it's a form of warfare honestly is what we're seeing so protect yourselves document everything um have numbers ready have numbers of somebody to call um whether it be a lawyer or a family member Because if you're there in a situation, you can be taken.

They do take citizens and then release them later, you know, especially citizens that are in the area and, you know, they start documenting or want to speak up for somebody. So, you know, if you're a U.S. citizen, don't think you're safe, especially if you're brown. They are racially profiling. All right. Well, folks can go to LATaco.com to find memos, daily memo,

and other stories about what's happening in L.A. And you guys also have, do you have like an apparatus to report sightings or anything like that? Yeah, we have our hotline is an email, tips at LATaco.com. It's really simple. Tips at LATaco.com. Memo, sorry. Appreciate the work you're doing. doing and thanks for taking the time to to walk us through this stuff uh love to check back in

with you uh you know sometime in the future see how you guys are doing and and and and any support uh folks can find a subscribe and a donate link there as well yes appreciate it thank you for bringing attention to this and having me on appreciate the show of course thanks memo all right folks we're going to take a quick break head into the so-called fun half of the program so well i know i know it has it's it's always in quotes these days um head over to uh la taco dot com give those folks some support and and also i would imagine also going to be helpful to write into whatever publication that you watch or read on a regular basis and say, cover this stuff.

I think both as a matter of like, you know, broadly the politics of this, but also in terms of like helping people, the more coverage this gets, the better. There was that old saying with that paper democracy dies in the dark. They don't do that anymore over at the Washington Post, but... Well, they're doing better than New York Times, at least. Oh, my God. Oh, they did? I mean, I got...

Yeah, the Washington, well, not to step on your very good joke, but at least the Washington Post, like, the New York Times has made itself into such an embarrassment that the Washington Post looks so much better by comparison. I know it. It's a race to the bottom. Yep. Also, don't forget, just coffee. Co-op, Fair Trade Coffee, hot chocolate, use the coupon code majority, get 10% off.

It's a co-op. They support their farmers in Chiapas and in Africa in a way that most roasters do not. So check them out. Justcoffee.coop. Check that out. also left reckoning I think they streamed last night

and I'm just very their YouTube but who's the blame for Texas flood and Trump threatens around yeah it was Matt on there

I know that I've read that Griscom's been doing very good coverage of the what was that but it rings a bell every time you look for Matt

Oh okay I've heard very good things about the coverage that Grissom's been doing about the stuff in check that out. Matt Free.

Whoa. Actual vacation for Matt. Somebody's really playing video games overtime. I mean, he's been enjoying. I think he's been home,

not to give out his assassination coordinates, but he's been tweeting some nice photos of nature, but he still tweets. He's still getting his blood pressure up. and going after folks on

Twitter, which I can relate to. In between, probably listening to listening to a book while playing some video game. A book at four times speed. A book at four times speed to like a level, sometimes his phone will accidentally play and you'll hear how fast it is.

And it's like, I woke up from a nightmare. And I still remember it. I'm like, oh my God. Sounds like a horror movie. Yeah. He's like, Alvin and the Chipmunks. for him. Yep. He's got to speed it up. Folks, see you in the fun half. Three months from now, six months from now, nine months from now, and I don't think it's

going to be the same as it looks like in six months from now. And I don't know if it's necessarily going to be better six months from now than it is three months from now. But I think around 18 months out, we're going to look back and go like, wow. What? What is that going on? It's wait a second hold on for hold on for a second Emma welcome to the program Hey Matt What is up everyone

No me keen You did it Let's go Brandon Let's go Brandon Let's go Brandon Bradley you want to say hello Sorry to disappoint Everyone I'm just a random guy

It's all the boys today. Fundamentally false. No, I'm sorry. Women's... Stop talking for a second. Let me finish. Where is this coming from, dude? But dude, you want to smoke this?

Seven, eight. Yes. Hi, is he me? Is this name? Yes. Is it me? Is it me? It is you.

Is it me? I think it is you. you. No sound. Every single freaking day. What's on your mind? We can discuss free markets

and we can discuss capitalism. I'm going to just know what. Libertarians. They're so stupid though. Common sense says, of course. Gobbled e gook. We fucking nailed him.

So what's 79 plus 21? Challenge met. I'm positively clovery. I believe 96, I want to say. 857. 210. 35. 501.

1.5. 38. 911. $3,400, $1,900, $6, $4, $3 trillion sold. It's a zero-sum game. Actually, you're making a think less. But let me say this. Poop.

You can call it satire. Sam goes to satire. On top of it all, my favorite part about you is just like every day, all day, like everything you do. Without a doubt. Hey, buddy, we see you. All right, folks. Folks. It's just the week being weeded out, obviously.

Yeah, sun's out, guns out. I don't know. But you should know. People just don't like to entertain ideas anyway. I have a question. Who cares? Our chat is enabled, folks. I love it.

I do love that. Got to jump. I got to be quick. I get a jump. I'm losing it, bro. two o'clock we're already late and the guy's being a dick so screw him um um sent to a gulaw outrageous like what is wrong with you love you bye love you love you bye bye