The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1033: Labor Law Pertaining to Illegal Migrants w/ Anthony Raimondo

Episode Date: March 31, 2024

67 MinutesPG-13Anthony Raimondo is a labor lawyer who worked in California dealing with regulations pertaining to illegals.Anthony joins Pete to talk about the ins and outs of labor laws pertaining to employers who have illegals on the books using fake social security numbers and IDs.VIP Summit 3-Truth To Freedom - Autonomy w/ Richard GroveSupport Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Thank you so much. I want to welcome everyone back to the Piquino show. For the first time, I'm here with Anthony Romando. So how are you doing, Anthony? I'm great, Pete. How are you? Doing good. Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about yourself?

I'm an attorney. I'm licensed in three different states, California, Washington, and Oregon. I've practiced primarily civil law in my career, although I did spend a little bit of time as a public defender. And I've dealt with a wide variety of issues mostly for small businesses, family farms, a lot of stuff. in agriculture and a lot of stuff dealing with agricultural labor in California. So I've seen a lot of the reality of how illegal immigration works on the ground and the sort of the strange unreality of our legal system when it comes to immigration. Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about what you were about some of your successes in

2020 because that's when we really became acquainted with each other. Yeah. So at that time, I was operating my own law firm in Fresno, California. And like most of California, we had a lockdown locally. And I didn't know what to make it very much at the start, but I quickly connected with some local small business owners that had defied the lockdown and it stayed open anyway. and we're being harassed by local authorities through code enforcement proceedings. So I used my law firm to defend those guys free of charge and help these businesses stay open,

which ultimately got me a Zoom call audience with the mayor. And I think we had a pretty good impact as far as getting the city to back off of the lockdown strategy entirely. after that I pivoted to as the vaccine came out I developed a template for people to request vaccine exempted help people all over the country really use that to get vaccine exemptions for school for jobs anywhere where they have vaccine mandates and then ultimately I ended up representing a handful of different people who took a principled stand on the vaccine and actually lost their jobs either we're forced to quit or we're outright fired for refusing to take the shot. And I was able to get some folks compensation for that job loss. So that was very, was very

gratifying. Yeah, I just want to thank you for the work you did with our friend, mutual friend Mark Clare. He, uh, things got really bad for him and he was actually living in Mexico for a little while. But I think you're the reason why he was able to come back to, come back to the States and even start working again in the same industry that he was in. Well, you know, I was very lucky to meet Mark and I hope that I was helpful to him. But honestly, I'm grateful for the opportunity to know and help somebody like Mark because the people who did what he did, which was take that stand when they had something to lose, are people of courage and principle that I really admire.

I mean, I was at a point where I owned my own business and I controlled my own industry. income. So I didn't have to answer to anybody but myself. Nobody was going to make me take a shot. I kept my office open through all of it. And so I have a lot of admiration for people who were willing to take personal risk to stand up for what they believe in. And Mark is definitely one of those folks. All right. Let's get into what we wanted to talk about today. I had my friend Charles on the other day. He was former INS. And he was talking. talking about some of the procedures, even pre-9-11, of how easy it was for people. He dealt mostly with people coming through the airport and things like that.

But you dealt a lot with migrant labor, illegal migrant labor in California. Why don't you give us a little background on that? Yeah, so I specialized in agricultural labor for a long time in California. So I had clients in literally every part of the state where there's agriculture. And for the first half of my career, I used to spend at least a week every year down in El Central California and Yuma, Arizona. For the winter farming that happens to year, all your desert, all your salad crops in the wintertime are grown down in the desert right near the border in that Yuma, El Central Corridor, Imperial Valley Corridor. and I came to specialize in the representation of farm labor contractors, which is really specializing in the business of labor supply for agriculture,

which is 90 plus percent undocumented illegal aliens. Whatever euphemism you want to apply to it, it's people who've entered the country illegally and are working without proper legal authorization in the United States. So I've seen it very close to the ground. I've also dealt with ICE quite a bit. I've handled ICE audits, you know, where they do a workplace audit of the employer's documentation to make sure the employers in compliance of immigration law.

I've dealt with the legal consequences of, you know, the use of stolen Social Security numbers, which is rampant. And then personally, I did a lot of battle with a legal aid entity, which are like these left-wing social justice warrior lawyers that use legal aid grants from the federal government to fund their activities and to the farmers that I represented. And one of the federal regulations that governs their funding is they're not supposed to be provided funding to illegal or providing legal services to illegal aliens. Those funds are supposed to be used for people legally present in the United States. And so I used some connections that I had at ICE to verify that their clients who were suing my clients were illegal aliens.

And then I reported the lawyers to the people that oversee their funding. And in a couple of cases, actually, their clients got arrested and removed from the United States, which ended up in a very long saga for me where the state bar of California tried to take away my license for doing this. I had to defend myself for many years. I was sued personally in federal court, but ultimately I was exonerated by the California State Bar after a trial through their disciplinary system that when I told the truth, I did nothing wrong, which in California is not a foregone conclusion. So that's a long way around it.

I've seen how the immigration system operates from a wide variety of perspective. And I think the thing for people to think about if they think about immigration is that the issue doesn't begin and end at the border. I think there's actually a lot more to be done when we contemplate how illegal aliens live and work in the United States. You know, where do they get their social security numbers? Who are they working for? The vast majority of them are on payrolls, not, you know, cash under the table as people sort of stereotypically look at. I mean, that stuff exists, but on a massive scale, you have people working in conventional industries on payrolls who are not legally present in the United States. So the sort of the how that happens and the mechanics of that happening is something that we have to pay attention to if we really want to address the problem that we have with illegal immigration of this country.

This didn't start yesterday and it didn't start with the Biden administration. I mean, I've been practicing in this area for 25 years, and it's been going on my whole career, and it really started before that, you know, as far back as the 86 IRCA immigration reform, Immigration Reform and Control Act, which was signed by Ronald Reagan, gave the largest amnesty to illegal aliens in U.S. history, which I think was a very significant watershed moment. But if you go back before that, the kind of modern immigration system that we have was born in the late 60s, early 70s. And we have a system of enforcement that looks at illegal entry at the border, and you can kind of think of the border as this physical space that we operate. How do we stop people from coming in?

But more importantly, how do we make it untenable for people to live here and survive here if they do, enter illegally because the physical structure of the border is difficult to enforce. But there's a whole lot of things that you can do to make it difficult if not impossible to live here as an illegal alien. And we've done quite the opposite over the course of many, many decades. So reversing that is a significant legal and logistical problem, but it certainly can be done. You catch them in the corner of your eye, distinctive by design, They move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range.

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Part of expert electrical. See it, buy it, get it tomorrow. You know, fight Branda. So a lot of people will point to families like the Cokes who fund, like the Cato Institute, and the Cato Institute comes out with these reports about how we need immigration, how immigration, it doesn't cost us any more than, we're actually making money by having the immigrants here, and then you start examining it, and you realize that they're not taking into consideration, on public schooling that their kids are going to have,

their kids are going to have things like that. But, yeah, it never made any sense to me that they're coming here to work under the table. If they're coming here, they're going to be on somebody's payroll, but if they're here illegally and they don't have a green card, they don't have a Social Security number, how are they doing this? How are they managing to do this? And not only how are they managing to do it, how have companies managed to create their own, like, many kind of bureaucracy where they're able to

have all of these illegals working for them who don't, in reality, have social security numbers? Well, I think worksite enforcement is one of the most important pieces of this that nobody ever talks about. So let's talk for a minute just about what the law required and what it means for an employer to comply with immigration law regarding the hiring of people who are legally authorized to work in the United States. And then I'll explain, I'll explain what the law says and then I'll explain how it actually works in reality. So it always shocks people when I talk about this, when I explain that it's not. not illegal to hire someone who is not legally authorized to work in the United States. It's not. It's just simply not. You can hire an illegal alien without violating any laws in the U.S. The key is, did you know that they were illegal or did you have what's called constructive knowledge?

Constructive knowledge is just a legal term for you had facts and information in your possession that were sufficient that you should have known that the person was. illegally in the United States. So the basic tool of work site enforcement is the I-9 form, which probably at some point or another, everyone listening to this has filled out an I-9 form and has given an employer, their driver's license, and their social security card, and signed off on that paperwork as part of the hiring process. Probably never even thought about it or even paid attention to what it says on that form. That form is the employer's verification of who the person is and their legal right to work in the United States. So those documents that

you provide, and there's a wide range of documents out there, but the documents that you provide are identity and your authorization to work in the United States and for your employer to verify it. So on the simplest level, there's three types of documents. There's a list A, a list B, and a list C document. A list A document is a document that proves both identity and authorization to work. Most classic example would be like a U.S. passport. It has your picture on it, has your name on it, and only a U.S. citizen can get it. So if you have one, it proves both your identity, who you are, and that you have the right to work here. A list B document is identity only. Driver's license would be the classic example. Has your picture, has your name, it says who you are,

but it doesn't tell anybody whether you have the legal right to work in the United States. A list C document shows legal status but not identity. A Social Security card would be the classic example of that. If you have a Social Security card that's valid, you can work, but it doesn't have your picture on it, so you need an identity document to make sure that it's the same person. So anytime anybody gets a job in the United States, the employer is required to go through this I-9 process where they see these documents and they verify who the person is and that they're entitled to work in the United States. The problem with that is, is that the market in fake documents is, I mean, it's healthy to say the least.

You know, for example, I haven't looked into it for a while, but the last time I looked into it, you could buy a permanent resident alien card, which is what everyone thinks of as a green card. They're not green anymore, but the permanent resident alien card, you could buy it off the street in San Francisco for 80 bucks. They take you up in an apartment. They take your picture. They print the card right there, and you'll have a card that looks exactly like one that would be government issued. And as long as it looks legitimate, the employer is legally required to accept it. So you have this weird dance that has developed between government employers or government entities or agencies and employers.

on, we all know. I mean, in an industry like agriculture, everybody knows it's 90 plus percent in California that are illegal aliens. I mean, literally it's that hot. I'm sitting in a hotel in Denton, Texas right now. I guarantee you my bed was made by an illegal alien. My breakfast was probably cooked by an illegal alien.

I mean, these industries are rampant with it. And we all know they have fake IDs. But if the IDs are good enough, I mean, you know, the joke I make with dairy farmers, is if somebody's not smart enough to find a decent fake ID, then they're not smart enough to be milking your cows. That's how easy it is to get documentation that will at least pass muster. Because in those industries, what employers are looking for is that plausible deniability.

Hey, I checked these documents and they looked good. And the reason why the permanent resident alien card or green card is so valuable is that it is a list A document, and it's valid forever. So if I check your documents and you have a fake permanent resident alien card, but it's a decent fake as they all are. They're all good. They're all good quality fakes. That's all I need to hire you. And if your fake ID look decent, I'm off the hook as far as, you know, I have plausible deniability of your immigration status.

So I'm good to go. And as long as you don't leave my employment, I don't ever have to verify that again. because a permanent resident alien status is good forever. The card expires every 10 years, but the status doesn't expire with it. Like when your passport expires, your U.S. citizenship doesn't expire, just a document expired. Well, your permanent resident alien status works the same way. So once they've provided that card to their employer, they never have to worry about it again. And then they use either fake or stolen social security numbers to use for payroll reporting purposes.

most often what they do is they steal social security numbers that belong to infants. And then those are sold because nobody notices when W2 wages are assigned to an infant. If you steal a social security number for somebody who's of working age, they start to notice it. You know, we would get these calls from time to time where our clients were being contacted by people saying, hey, I file for my taxes and the IRS says I owe them taxes based on wages I have from your ranch, and I've never worked for you. I live in Georgia somewhere.

I don't live in California. During COVID, we had huge problems because people were applying for all kinds of government benefits in other states, and it would come up that they were working at a farm in California through their Social Security number. So that's why they typically prefer to steal social security numbers that belong to infants,

because it takes years for that to catch up and that number can be circulated for a while. But even with the Social Security number thing, like nobody ever does anything about that because it's just, it's a payroll tax violation to the IRS to report some of these wages under the wrong Social Security number.

So, like, every agricultural employer in California has gotten what's called a Social Security mismatch letter, where the Social Security Administration will mail out a letter to the employer saying, hey, we have this, number of employees, here's who they are from your company whose names don't match the social security numbers in our database. And you know, you're required, there's a process you're required to go through to use due diligence to get the correct social from the employee.

But if they didn't use that questionable social security card for their I-9, say they gave you a fake permanent resident alien card for their I-9, you don't have an immigration problem. You have an IRS penalty problem, and I've never heard of anyone. ever getting penalized for it. And Social Security is not allowed to share that information with immigration. So ICE doesn't get access to the information that Social Security has about people who are working under mismatch names and Social Security numbers, so it can't be used for immigration enforcement.

So there's all these little wrinkles and dead ends in the law that prevent us and create these environments in which, you know, we all know what's happening in certain industries, especially in California, and we all turn a blind eye to it because the myth is that Americans won't work in the fields. That's the myth. I don't know if that's true or not. I mean, you know, I have a lot of farmers who've told me, you know, that, hey, every time we hire a white guy, it doesn't work out. But I I often wonder if maybe we've just, we've gotten easy with this, it's gotten easy to have this labor source and we've taken it for granted. So, you know, we don't make enough of an effort to figure out how to make it work with the population that we have. But I've heard the labor shortage stuff for a long time and I'm very skeptical of it because after 9-11, when I was a young lawyer, everybody claimed that there was a labor shortage because Bush had really militarized the border.

And I went down to El Central at that time and it was very shocked. how much military there was patrolling the border at that time. And so people complained that that was causing labor shortages because the border had gotten so much tighter. But then I saw other times where things had gotten easier at the border and people still complained that there were labor shortages. So I don't know how real the labor shortage stuff is, but I also know that it's incredibly damaging

to just keep importing on a mass scale, millions of the world's poorest and least educated people. You know, your average farm worker that crosses the border is not, you know, Mexico's educated class. You're talking about people that have, I mean, I've taken their depositions. Oftentimes they have a second or third grade education from Mexico. And, you know, they come here out of economic desperation and they find work in our fields. but all up and down places like the San Joaquin Valley in California are communities that have been devastated by decades of this. You know, public schools that are just completely overwhelmed and overrun, public services that are overwhelmed and overrun.

Madeira, which is the next city north of Fresno, the hospital closed because they just lost so much money that there's now no more hospital in that city. and that's a city that has an incredibly high population of illegal aliens, mostly attracted by the agriculture around there. So for people to pretend that it doesn't cost us anything, and people like Cato to come up with these studies, it's just silly because all you have to do, I can take you for a ride up Highway 99 in California, and we could one by one visit cities,

smaller cities that had been really overwhelmed and devastated by the influx of a poor and desperate immigrant population that needs lots of services. And there's no way to turn that into a profitable enterprise for the United States. So that's a long way around to. I don't think it's a good thing to do. You know, I think it's like turning around a cargo ship to use probably what's an uncomfortable metaphor for today. But you're not going to make a U-turn-term. quickly with something like this, but at some point we have to draw a line in the sand and say,

we're not doing this anymore. And I think a significant aspect of that that's very politically uncomfortable is enforcement against employers and making it harder for employers to hire illegal aliens. It's an imperfect system, but we have an e-verify system that's voluntary, where you can verify these documents that would make the, you can, it's an online verification system that employers can sign up for voluntarily. But of course, in all these industries that rely on illegal alien labor, nobody ever signs up for it. There's a Social Security verification system where when you hire somebody, you can

submit their name and Social Security number and get verification of whether they match or not in real time. Also a voluntary system that people just don't sign up for. Because in the industries that rely on this immigrant labor, they really don't want to know. I mean, I had farm labor contractor clients working for major, major labels, like stuff that you would recognize that you see in your grocery store in food processing facilities, where they make like, you know, bag salads or vegetable plates for your Super Bowl party or all these different processed fresh produce products. And these companies will volunteer for E-Verify because

they want to be able to tell everybody that they're committed to only hiring legal workers. But then they'll hire a farm labor contractor who's not a e-verify to make sure they can get the workers they need because they don't believe they can get a sufficient workforce without hiring illegal aliens. So it's all kind of this dirty little secret that's going on that nobody will talk about publicly and that the enforcement is just a sad joke. I mean, I've been doing audit cases for years and ICE does nothing. I mean, if you just put a plausible effort forward on your I-9 process, they'll tell you that, you know, they'll identify who the illegal aliens are in your workforce and say you can't hire these people anymore. But they, I've never had a client penalized. And I've had several

clients where they did nothing at all. There was literally just no follow up at all on the audit. So we're not, we have an immigration system that's set up actually in principle correctly. You know, there are certain legal principles like if you, if you enter the United States illegally, that's supposed to be like the black mark that makes you an immigration law pariah. You can't correct that and it prevents you from getting legal status in the future. That's a good idea. That's a good thing. You know, the idea of significant civil and criminal penalties for employers who hire illegal aliens is a good thing. We never, from the time we implemented all this stuff, we never committed ourselves from day one, we never committed ourselves to making this system work as it's written.

And we just turned a blind eye away from it. I mean, my own experience in California was, I was treated as essentially that I had done something illegal because I truthfully reported that these attorneys were using U.S. taxpayer funds to represent illegal aliens in violation of federal law, and I told the truth about it. So that's how backwards we are. We have layers that are both state and federal.

So a state like California, for example, makes it very easy for illegal aliens to get unemployment benefits and other public benefits. Other states make it harder. But the feds put no pressure on a state like California. There's no consequences on them for their defiance of immigration law and the things that they do that make it very, very easy for illegal aliens to live here. when if you look at federal immigration law it is designed to disincentivize illegal entry from from the moment that a person enters it's supposed to be a very it's supposed to be a difficult

path to survive as an illegal alien in the United States and we've never committed ourselves to that can you clear something up because a couple of the things you said even though you said you've gotten in trouble for um you know going after these lawyers a couple of things you said could make it sound like you were working for these employers and trying to hide the fact that they had illegals working for them? Well, I've defended employers in ICE audits. I mean, there's, I'm a defense attorney, so it's what I do. Um, you know, but in the cases that I'm talking about, these are situations where you had, um, these attorneys are very ideologically motivated. These They're legal aid attorneys.

They're very ideologically motivated, and they're very anti-farming for a variety of different reasons. And so they would sue my clients for, you know, various types of claims related usually to labor issues. And they were doing that in violation of federal law because their clients were undocumented immigrants, and they were using funds that were set aside for the representation of low-income Americans. So I verified with people that I know the auditors at ICE from handling those cases. So I verified that their clients were illegal aliens and then I reported the lawyers to the people that controlled the funding. My hope was to cut off the funding from these people overall. But case by case, what was happening is I was getting them disqualified from cases where they were suing my clients.

And because they had access to federal funds, they were impossible to, deal with and would literally threaten to bankrupt my clients, and they didn't care because they still had the federal funding. Whereas if I could get other attorneys on those cases, you know, we can resolve things and work things out and reach solutions. So, yes, that's a long way around you. Have I represented employers who hired illegal aliens? Yes, because I've represented many, many farmers in California. I've represented construction employers. I've represented hospitality employers, lots and lots of industries where this goes on. I've given them legal advice on how to avoid the consequences of immigration law.

And I've defended them when they were accused of violating immigration law. But that's a separate issue from how I feel about this situation, you know, as an American. I mean, being a lawyer, especially being a defense lawyer, is a very strange profession because you have an obligation to zealously advocate for your client and defend your client, regardless of what it is that they may have done, and navigate them through the system as best you can. It doesn't mean that you approve of what they've done, and it doesn't mean you approve of necessarily the legal system that enables the circumstances that they find themselves in. So I guess that's the best way I can explain it. I had a question about W2 wages versus

1099. If they're using Social Security numbers and they're on, their employees, are they filing taxes? Would the IRS figure out, well, taxes are coming out, but nothing is getting filed at the end of the year? I mean, it seems to me the easiest way to do this would be to hire them all as 1099 labor, 1099 labor. But if they are salary or hourly labor, it seems like that would catch up every once in a while. Does that just not happen? Yeah, you can't get away with 1099ing these people because they're not, they don't meet the legal standards for like 1099 independent contractors. And if you really want the IRS after you, like don't pay social security and don't pay payroll taxes.

And you'll get the IRS after you much more quickly. What you're talking about on an individual level is you're talking about people who from an income tax perspective, individually these illegal aliens are probably overpaying. because they don't have much income, so they're not really obligated to pay very much in taxes. They're having taxes deducted from each one of their paychecks because they're on a payroll, but they're not filing a return, so they're never getting a refund. So the IRS has little concern over something like that because it doesn't cost the government coffer very much. And in fact, the dirty secret of all of this that nobody really knows the depth of is what happens to the Social Security contributions of the people that the Social Security Administration determines their name doesn't match the Social Security number on their W-2.

Allegedly, what the government claims is that money goes into what's called the Social Security suspense account, where it supposedly sits until they figure out who it actually belongs to. as far as I'm aware nobody has ever accounted for that I don't think anybody's ever looked at that money I don't think it's I don't know what they do with it it's either you know a black hole that they use to like

dump digits down that they need to get rid of or it's a slush fund but the one thing I don't believe is that the government is collecting all this money out of all these payrolls and just letting it sit because that's just not their nature because it's money that nobody can ever account for.

So, as I said, it's kind of off the radar of the IRS because it doesn't, you know, as long as the payroll taxes are being paid on it and the income taxes are being deducted from each person's check, the IRS doesn't have any reason to care about it, I guess is the, the real answer. Getting back to E-Verify, it would seem to me that the, Yeah, I heard the argument a few years ago when eVerify came up. This is just a way to get everything digitized to get all your information. It's another form of control.

But it seems like that if people actually wanted to stop this, making E-Verify mandatory and not voluntary, would that even begin to help it? What's your opinion on that? I think it would help. And I, you know, it's not like, it's not a perfect cure. Because, for example, E-Verify doesn't do anything to stop identity theft. There was a big workplace raid at a company called Smithfield Foods during the Bush administration, which is, that's the last time we had any large scale like workplace raids where they went in and just arrested large numbers of people. And at Smithfield Foods, it was all done through identity theft.

they were actually already in E-Verify, which is what protected the company. And they still had like thousands of illegals working there. Because with true identity theft, the documents are legitimate so they won't get picked up through a database comparison. But most of what we're talking about here is really low-level document fakery. And we can get rid of all of that with E-Verify. And again, the idea of multiple layers to really make it harder. You know, I hear a lot of people talk about, you know, the administrative state and people have read Burnham and things like that. And I'll admit, I've never read Burnham.

But I have knowledge of the administrative state from engaging with these people a lot over the last 25 years and defending individuals and businesses against various types of regulatory action by administrative agencies. These agencies can be moved in different directions very, very easily. You know, I saw a lot of agencies that I dealt with make a 180 change of ideological direction when Obama took office. One thing that I will say about the Obama administration is they understood the power of the executive branch, and they got all of these agencies working ideologically in the direction that they wanted them to go. you know i used to joke with the guys that i worked that i would encounter from the department of labor and i'm like you know when bush was president you guys we were all friends now that obama's president you guys all yell at me and when trump got elected i joked with them oh trump's going to be present

now we're all going to be friends again but with trump nothing changed from obama at all culturally within these agencies because i think he didn't really understand how to utilize the control of these agencies to move the people within them because very very few of them are really ideologs, they just want to get their pension. So if you can install the right people at the top of these agencies to push the right directives, the rest of these agencies will fall in line. And, you know, I think there's, you know, so I think mandatory E-Verify would be a great thing.

And I think there's a lot of other things that they can do just to make it more and more difficult. In particular, cracking down on states that to easily provide benefits is, it should be a priority. Yeah, you mentioned the Trump administration there and managerialism. And I think that's when, I think a lot of people started waking up to this because when for two years a president normally has, you know, the White House and then they have both, both houses of Congress and they have the Supreme Court, usually they can get pretty much done whatever they want. And he didn't. And if you say, that nothing changed from Obama to Trump and, you know, his main focus, I mean, the first thing he talked about was immigration, then people have to understand that the president only has

as much power as he's willing to use, that as he's willing to wield. And I think that unless he has people around him this time who, you know, if he does get elected, I mean, he Who knows what, I mean, everything could look completely different in six months. But if he does, I don't think there, you'll, unless those people around, the people around him know that the managerial state exists and that certain things have to be done and people have to be replaced and there have to be mass firings from day one, then this just keeps going on and on and on. and then the worst part of it is the next president can change it back to or completely change the culture of it around again. I guess that's what the power of an executive is in this country

if they're willing to use that. Well, I think that's an interesting issue because I think... So, you know, as you know, I'm a regular listener of your show And I've been very interested in some of the things that you and Thomas have talked about, about kind of the like the unimpressive people who now populate government. Because I think experience, that's very, very true. I think the problem is that people, we haven't had, you know,

I don't want this to be all about about Trump, but using Trump as an example, the reality of Trump being as much of an outsider to the system as he is, is that he didn't really know how to pull the right levers to make the things happen that he wanted to have happen. I don't even know that you need mass firing. And I'm talking about, I was, you know, I was dealing with all this stuff in the transition from Bush to Obama and then Obama to Trump in terms of like what my career spans. and there were major, major shifts from Bush to Obama in how these agencies operated. And there were no mass firings. There was no wholesale change of personnel.

The guy who had been super employer-friendly at the National Labor Relations Board under the Bush administration suddenly became hyper pro-union under the Obama administration. Why? Because that's what the people above him wanted him to do. And that's what these people do that populate these agencies. They're not, you know, these are not like nefarious evil geniuses. These are drones. And they'll do as they're told. And I think the problem with Trump is he didn't really understand how to wield that power within those agencies. I mean, I saw it even more dramatically on the state level in California, when we had Schwarzenegger come in and then we had Schwarzenegger to leave. You know, when Gray Davis got recalled in Schwarzenegger won election,

dealing with state agencies in California changed literally overnight. I mean, it was the experience that we had working on the business side of the line was literally transformed overnight. And when Schwarzenegger left and Governor Brown, Jerry Brown came in, literally another complete U-turn in terms of how you dealt with these people. And when Newsom came in, it was like an order of magnitude even worse. So an executive who knows which levers to pull and how to pull them can make dramatic changes. And there are ways to make lasting changes that they simply don't take opportunity.

Which, by the way, Obama was good at this. instead of executive orders, Trump should have focused on getting his people in charge of these federal agencies and issuing regulations. Because regulations are harder to change than executive orders. It takes process and it takes time and it's difficult to do. But Obama did a ton of things when he first came in where his agencies were issuing and publishing new regulations left and right in order to enforce and interpret the law the way that he wanted them to do so. So, you know, as much as anybody, I'd love to see them fire half the federal employees and, like, start tearing down this massive bureaucracy that we live within. But, you know, I don't know how realistic that is. But what I think is very feasible for the right people, for the right people who came into power under our existing system, who understood how to utilize our system, it would not be difficult to seize control of that administrative beast and use it in ways.

that would be much more effective than what we saw under someone like Trump. You've heard Trump say that if he's elected on the, you know, the first thing he's going to do is build a wall and then he's going to start mass deportations. From what you've seen of how these communities get set up and how they integrate or whatever, do you think there's any reality whatsoever to what he's promising? The easiest thing for him to do is build the wall. I don't think there's very many obstacles to building the law at all. But in terms of mass deportations, there's two huge obstacles there.

The first is arresting people. Unless the feds can get cooperation from state and local law enforcement, there will be no mass deportations. They don't have the manpower to do it. They don't have the facilities to put people in, to hold people in. The term deportation actually doesn't mean anything under the law. The actual term is removal. And removal is a normal legal process that goes through an immigration court that culminates in a judge issuing an order of removal, which is an order for the person to leave the United States.

That is only one way that people are removed from the United States. Another very common way is what's called voluntary removal, which is where they catch somebody that they know is illegal, who for some reason or another is on their priority. list. And they say, hey, we know, we got you. So we're going to arrest you and we're going to hold you in immigration jail and you can try to figure out how to defend your immigration case and maybe you're going to get removed. We think you probably will. Or you can take voluntary removal and we'll put you on a plane tonight and you'll be, you know, usually it's Mexico City. You'll be in Mexico City tonight. And if you take that, there'll be no records on you. You go back to Mexico go and do whatever.

And they take that option all the time and then they come right back. So, you know, this idea of deportation, what we're really talking about is removal. What Trump is talking about is formal removal. Well, the immigration courts are backed up already. But before you even got to the immigration courts, you would have to arrest and hold people. I mean, where I lived in California, when I first started practicing criminal law, if ICE issued an immigration hold on somebody, the jail honored. that and that person could not get out. They could not bond out. They couldn't be released.

Even if they wanted to keep a murderer in jail, they couldn't release somebody that ICE had told them to hold. And then ICE would pick these people up and remove them or move them to other facilities. But without the cooperation of state and local authorities for the manpower to arrest people and the facilities, jail and prison facilities to hold people in, and honestly, ultimately probably some sort of change in the living. litigation process in order to be able to process people through, you know, local courts or maybe even local federal courts instead of always just a specialized immigration courts. It's just, it's not, it's not possible under the current system. You're much, he'd be much better off focusing on workplace enforcement and removing incentives for people to cross the border in the first place, going after states and local communities that offer undue benefits. But these, you know, harboring is a serious federal offense. People who are providing hotel rooms to people who are illegal aliens and are not legally present in the United States are harboring illegal aliens.

And that's actually a serious criminal offense under federal law. Every state gets tons of money for their unemployment insurance systems from the federal government. The executive has the authority to cut all of that off. I mean, there's no reason that Donald Trump can't tell California. you, if you don't start demanding proof of legal status to give people unemployment insurance benefits or Medi-Cal benefits, then we're going to cut off the federal contributions to those programs. There's no reason the executive can't do that. And I think that would be a better, that would be a better hill for someone like Trump to die on than the wall and mass deportations.

Because I just don't know what the wall fixes anything because people can get around under, over, through. I mean, the wall is more symbolic. than anything else. And in terms of actually how the system works, I think addressing the things that are going on in the interior of the United States that incentivize illegal immigration and make it easy for them to live here, those things are much, much more important than trying to arrest and deport everybody, because the second one's not going to happen. Obviously, you'd have to do the first before you got to the second anyway. You've been around these people.

If, you know, you did get somebody in there who put those regulations in place, it would just make it impossible and unfeasible for businesses to either harbor, hire, all those things. What are the chances that these people self-remove? I think people would self-remove because, I mean, the time right after 9-11 was really, really interesting because nobody knew what was going to happen on the immigration front. All this stuff was happening with the consolidation of – I listened to your episode the other day. You know, a lot of things changed when they consolidated ICE into the Department of Homeland of Security.

The former INS became ICE and became part of DHS. And there was all this militarization on the border. And honestly, when that happened, and then when Trump was first elected, we saw people go back. I mean, we saw, I had clients call me about people who were scared and left because they didn't know what the climate was going to be like in the United States. And I can tell you this, I know people who are involved with people who bring workers across the border for money. And I'll say this for Trump. when Trump became president, just all of his talk about immigration, that alone, doubled the price to bring somebody across the border. So it makes a difference when, you know, even the rhetoric makes a difference. I mean, the rhetoric of Joe Biden from day one was, come here, get inside the country, and you'll be able to figure it out later, which is the opposite of how our immigration system is designed to work.

our immigration system is designed to send the message. It doesn't matter if you get in here illegally and try to make it work. You're not going to be able to fix it. If you came in here illegally, it's not going to work out for you. I mean, it's supposed to be a black mark on you forever if you enter and remain in the United States illegally. A black mark that prevents you from getting legal status. I mean, I think there's a lot of things that a motivated executive could do quickly. I mean, they already have the legal authority by statute to force asylum seekers to remain in third-party countries that are deemed to be safe for them, of which both Canada and Mexico qualify as.

So, you know, making these people stay in another country while they're – most of the asylum applications are just preposterous and they can be dismissed very, very quickly. because fleeing poverty is not a basis for asylum. Asylum requires that you're able to show that you're under some sort of threat of violence or oppression due largely, usually to political or religious beliefs. So all these economic refugees are not actual refugees and they're not eligible for asylum. And there's no reason that they can't be processed in another country and never allowed to set foot in the United States. So I think it's important to have an executive that speaks strongly on the subject. But I think it's the only way we're going to change Americans' attitudes on this issue.

I think if we could ever get labor unions to go back to where they used to be, labor unions used to be adamantly opposed to illegal immigration because it suppresses American wages. You know, I'm sure you've seen from your libertarian days the famous grass that they show about the value of the dollar and like the flattening of wages, you know, starting around the time of going off the gold standard. Well, I come from a union family. I know all about this. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, they were against illegal immigration because it suppresses American wages. Now they love illegal immigration because it's more members.

it's more bobby they can skim dues off of. If we could ever get organized labor on the idea that they need to protect American wages, because you see that flattening of wages happening about the same time as the implementation of our modern immigration system. I've been fighting with the United Farm Workers Union in California my whole career,

and their modern, like, woke staff they have now get mad at me at times. I actually have a copy of a letter that Caesar Chavez wrote, demanding that INS closed the border to prevent scab farm workers from coming across the border and undermining the union. That used to be organized labor in this country. But now what we want is a cheapening of labor. And I think, you know, to circle back to what we were talking about before, I think a lot of the mythology about labor shortages is designed to keep Americans from thinking about the fact that importing millions and millions and millions of unskilled

laborers, diminishes their economic opportunity, and diminishes the value of their labor. Because to me, that's the most direct negative impact of all of this illegal immigration, is we haven't, I think we actually have an oversupply of labor. I mean, the evidence that I've seen is there's an oversupply of labor that is flattening the wages of Americans and has helped kill our middle class, especially, frankly, in in blue-collar industries where immigrant labor can come in a lot cheaper as far as competition goes and as far as supply goes. So I think a lot of this propaganda about, oh, we need this labor, we need this immigration, we need this immigration, is designed to deceive us away from the

fact that what this immigration is doing is the suppressing the value of American labor and native industries. So my personal belief is. It sounds like you're saying if you get an executive in there who is willing to go the regulation route and then, you know, tell someone like California that, you know, if you keep them there, if you give them benefits, freebies to stay there, even when they can't work there, we're just going to cut off whatever, whatever kind of federal funds you're getting. If you did that to a bunch of states that were, that were engaging in this, you could actually make headway in getting these people to self-deport. self-remove, as you were saying.

And if California doesn't want to do that, then, you know, who knows? You can have... I'm one of these people who believes if there's ever going to be secession in the United States. It's probably going to be a blue state first, you know, calling everybody... Calling the White House fascist or, you know, the government fascist and we're leaving. Either way, it sounds like it could... It could improve the situation because, I mean, I think mass deportations is... I mean, it's what you said, unless you get the states on board.

And, you know, libertarians have been making this argument for how long that, oh, you don't have to worry. I mean, the DEA doesn't even have the budget to, like, raid every dispensary in L.A. County once in a year. So they don't have the budget to do all this. They would need the states in order to do all this. And if they don't get any help from California, you just have the feds going in there and they're going to blow their budget in a week. Yeah, I mean, the

feds have this limited power in terms of manpower for the muscle side of law enforcement, but they have a whole lot of economic muscle that they conflect on these states. I mean, you said a lot there, so I actually think having lived in California for most of my life, I actually think California is a

much bigger candidate for succession than Texas is for the reasons that you say, but also because California has an arrogance, and if you spent much time there, you'll know that this is true. California is an arrogance that they believe that they're already basically economically independent anyway. Talk to somebody from California for five minutes and they'll tell you how they're, you know, the world's fifth largest economy or whatever, the stupid status that they love to throw out there. But they really think that the rest of the country is taking advantage of California and not the other way around.

So I think it wouldn't take much to convince Californians that they should just do their own thing and stop propping up, forgive me, Pete, but stop propping up. you know, Alabama. Because that's how they feel about it. And I think, you know, you'd have to have an executive, I think, who was willing to take a strong stance on this and fire a lot of different guns knowing that not all of them were going to hit their target. But I think it starts with you need a strong person appointed to be the DHS secretary. You need a strong person to be the head of ICE.

and you need a strong person to be the head of the border patrol. Those three positions are really, really critical because then within their realms of responsibility, they can set those organizational priorities in ways that make enforcement much more aggressive. And again, it's not going to be perfect, but we need it to be more aggressive. Then I think the political side of it for that executive

is to start going after those states that don't play ball. you know, start having ICE issue ice holds on dangerous criminals. And when they refuse, start building a case against them and start withholding federal funds. All these federal funds that get distributed through the states are distributed through executive branch agencies. So I don't think there's any reason why a motivating executive cannot use those federal purse strings in a variety of ways, whether it's funding, state unemployment insurance benefits, whether it's federal Department of Education Fund. You know, I mean, think about what our world would have looked like in 2020 if Trump had announced that he was going to cut off federal Department of Education funds to any state that

closed its schools. Not one state would have closed in schools. And we can do the same thing in terms of state cooperation with federal law enforcement. But it's going to be a knockdown fight to change this stuff because there's so much momentum behind it in so many years. So it has to be an executive who's willing to, you know, take those battles in the press and take those ugly political battles. And in terms of like the cabinet positions involved, you better have like three or four backups ready because you're not going to be able to get those people confirmed if, you know, you don't have the right balance in Congress to do so. But I'd rather see somebody at least try to move. I would like to be able to. I would like to

to see somebody who is willing to tell the public more of the truth of how this actually operates and where we have problems and what this system is supposed to do and what it's not what it's failing to do um then and you know the stuff that the media talks about about this the average person is so ignorant of how any of this operated i mean when i went through all my legal trouble i was shocked at these judges that were hearing my case actually believed that ice is like driving around cities in black vans, snatching people off the street, throwing a bag over their head,

and they wake up in Mexico. It just doesn't work that way. And, you know, they have long had priorities based upon people's criminal conduct, which means that once people enter this country, if they can keep their nose clean and, you know, live and work quietly,

they can live here easily for decades without ever having a problem. And that's what we have to change. And that's the hard part of this, because people try to make those folks into sensitive, I mean, sympathetic characters. They try to, you know,

oh, he's been here all these years. Oh, he's had a family. Oh, you know, the DACA thing, the dreamer thing drove me crazy. Like, because I was all for, oh, you know what? Your parent brought you here illegally as a baby. Well, blame your mom then for screwing up your life.

You're gone. You're leaving. I'm sorry. There shouldn't be that. Until we send the message, that illegal entry is only going to make everything worse for you, you're going to still have illegal entry. So yeah, the price for bringing your baby in illegally is that if that kid grows up in the United States and then we catch up with him that he was brought here illegally, he's going

to go back to Mexico and his wife is going to be screwed up. And we have to harden ourselves to these cases. Otherwise, you don't have a border enforcement. You think you're going to build a wall and that's going to do it, that's not going to do it. You have to make your nation. inhospitable to a population that you did not welcome to come here. I'm going to ask you this. And, I mean, I'm, you know, I respect the hell out of you for the work, the work you've been doing and everything. Do you feel like you've contributed it all to this?

And do you have any regret? It's funny because I've gotten a few people upset with me in the, in the California agricultural community, because I've said to them that, because a lot of these folks are very conservative, you know, right-wing Trump-supporting people. And I've said that, you know, the industry has to reckon with what it's done to contribute to this problem. And they get very angry at me and they get very defensive towards me when I say things like that. But I think it's true. And I think that's true of me as well, because I have done work that has helped to enable this problem and has helped people to navigate through it in a way where, you know, they could

employ people that they knew they weren't supposed to be employing, but be legally protected from it. So I don't know if regret is the word that I would use. I would say I feel some measure of accountability, which is why I'm grateful to have the opportunity to talk about stuff like this on your show. Because I would like to contribute to the solution by talking to people about how this works and how these things happen. You know, the one thing that, that, that I would say is that despite the things that I have done in my career that may have contributed to this problem, I've also done things kind of the other way that, you know, I paid a heavy price for, which is more than most people have done.

so you know like anybody else I've made I've done good things in my life and I've done things that you know may have contributed to problems of different types but I don't I don't like living in regret of this sort of thing I just I would like for people to understand the reality of how this works because I don't think ever hear anybody having like honest conversations about immigration and how it works and like you know the

I think the people who are are screaming for open borders and the people who are screaming for mass deportations are equally living in fantasy land. And that stuff just isn't particularly helpful. It's like, we as a nation have done something that I don't know that we've done in any other area where we literally have disregarded our own laws for 50 years in immigration. And we have willingly and knowingly allowed our system to operate in violation of its own principles. and laws for over 50 years. And so it presents an interesting practical problem.

How do you unravel that and undo that? You know, you can't just say we built a law, a wall, we threw a light switch, and now it's fixed, right? We've got, you know, 15 to 20 million people that entered this country illegally living and working here. And we don't have the physical capacity to load them up on truck, and ship them across the border. And moreover, legally we can't do that because they are,

whether you think they should be or not, they are entitled to due process under our system. So I like the idea of making states get on board with the idea that this is a national problem that we all need to be rolling in the same direction to solve. And I like the idea of making the legal and financial environment in our country so inhospitable to these. folks that many of them do self-remove and we reduce the flow of the ones that come here because

I don't think that's that hard to do. I think some parts of it are harder than others and I think the hardest part is getting states on board, but I think that kind of fight between the state and federal government is probably long overdue and it's one that would be good for us to engage it no matter how it comes out. So I know like me you moved out to a more rural setting and everything. What are you doing these days? So I sold my law firm to the guys that work for me, and I'm still working with them on a consulting basis, so I'm still doing some things down with them

and with the farmers down in California. I've also started a solo practice where I am now, and I'm starting to do some things with folks locally trying to do stuff that's closer to the ground, kind of in service to this little community that I'm in, where there's not really much in the way of lawyers available for people. So I'm kind of figuring out what that looks like and, you know, what I can do to be in service to this community that has welcomed me.

So still practicing law, I would say I'm probably working at this point about 30% of the time. And then we'll see what, you know, we'll see what comes along and what kind of opportunities are there. I've got some things, some irons into fire, and I'm making some connections with people. And the next phase will be interesting for me because it's the first time at a long time that like the next, for a long time, I've been on a path where I kind of knew where I was going. So we'll see where it takes me. Well, I want to thank you for the help you've given me with some of the problem that I've had recently. And yeah, I think you do, I think you do good work. And I think you're, because of what you've been engaged in, you can educate people on how this actually works.

And you're the kind of person I would love to see be an advisor to whichever president has the Machiavellian balls to actually go after and attack this problem. I would love to see that day arise. And if it did, I would probably be happy to serve in some kind of capacity like that. But until then, I'm going to keep talking about it and just trying to let people know what's going on. All right, Anthony. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thanks, Pete.