The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 11 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Stephen Miller has been privately raging at ICE officials, demanding that they send their agents out to arrest as many day laborers and construction workers as possible—all to get those deportation numbers way, way up. We’ve all seen the impact all this is having on immigrants and Americans. It’s a horror. But behind all of this, something else is happening. The Atlantic reports an important piece that morale at ICE is actually plummeting. And tellingly, a key reason for it is precisely that ICE is now going after low-level people rather than serious criminals. That’s a striking indictment of Trump-Miller priorities. It’s also a very clear sign of just how dark and ugly ICE’s law enforcement agenda has gotten and how off the rails it all is. Today we’re talking about all this with one of our favorite observers on this issue: Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us. We’re going to get into all the hidden implications of this news. Todd, thanks for coming on.
Todd Schulte: Thanks for having me. I’m a longtime listener, first-time participant.
Sargent: Great. Glad to hear someone’s listening. So this new report in The Atlantic by Nick Miroff, who’s an experienced immigration reporter, is really remarkable. Let’s start with what it says about Stephen Miller. He and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem met with senior ICE officials in May, [during which] Miller and Noem berated the officials, insisting that ICE now has to hit quotas of 3,000 arrests per day. Critically, the piece reports that the officials grew uncomfortable at that, and Miller then steamrolled anyone who resisted according to the piece. Todd, for these people, it’s only about getting as many immigrants out of the country as possible. Your thoughts on this?
Schulte: Yeah. I think it’s really important to keep in mind that for your average voter, they may not have known what to expect on immigration policy. The president said a lot of things the first time he ran. There were a lot of really awful policies he put in place, but the promises to deport as many people as possible—thankfully, thanks to a lot of work people on the ground did—didn’t happen. This time around, you have seen over the past six months—just to be very clear—an unprecedented layering of tools and policies designed to inflict as much chaos and harm on immigrant communities as possible. And at the front of that is an effort to strip away status from millions of people, subject millions and millions of people to immigration enforcement, with that goal to maximize the number of people who—I want to be clear—would be arrested but also are going through their lives fearing that they themselves or their family members could be subjected to arrest at any time.
Sargent: Trump has now on two occasions admitted forthrightly.… Well, maybe forthrightly isn’t the word for anything Trump says, but he did admit—maybe accidentally—that his mass deportations are hurting the economy. He said they’re hurting farmers. He said straight out that these deportations are taking away good workers from employers and that Americans are not rushing in to fill the jobs. It’s the most amazing indictment of Trump’s policies I’ve heard in a while.
Schulte: I think it’s really important to, yeah, just be really clear about that. The president is right when he is saying his immigration policies are going to do incredible harm to the economy. We at FWD.us actually just came out with a report last week and it showed that the three pillars of his policies—deportation, stripping away work authorization, cuts to legal immigration—are going to cost the average American family $2,150 a year.
Sargent: Well, there was a really interesting quote in The Atlantic piece from Adam Boyd, who’s a 33-year-old ICE attorney who resigned from ICE over all this. He said, “We are now focusing on numbers over all else” at a time when “there are drug traffickers and national-security threats and human-rights violators in our country who need to be dealt with.” That’s a recent ICE attorney talking. He’s putting it right out there that Stephen Miller’s crazed ideological obsession with reducing the number of immigrants in this country is taking resources away from fighting more serious crimes. Todd, this, too: Shouldn’t this shift of resources be part of the discussion? Seems like a huge part of the story.
Schulte: We have really clear evidence on public safety. So let’s be clear, arrest quotas in general, whether in the immigration context or not, lead to worse public safety outcomes. Putting more people in prisons and more people in jails lead to worse public safety outcomes. And the jurisdictions that have reduced the use of incarceration have seen crime drop more. So let’s be really clear: This is not about public safety. It is about, as you said, maximizing these numbers here. I think that’s such an important quote there. And also, outside just the ICE context here, when you’re talking about prioritizing other huge government agencies, the IRS is going to be looking into harboring provisions. The IRS is not going to be looking into people who may be involved in tax evasion or are super high-net-worth earners here. We know what the game is here. We should be honest. The game is to push out as many immigrants as possible, and I think it’s interesting that you have people on the record saying that.
Sargent: I think it’s really important. And in fact, NBC News also got a piece of the story a while back. [It] didn’t get much attention, which shocked me, but they quoted a number of different law enforcement agents at other agencies in the federal government saying that it was pissing them off, that so much was going into mass deportations that it was actually siphoning resources away from all these other serious crimes. I don’t know. It seems to me like that should be something we talk about more.
Schulte: I think it is. I’m going to read a quote from the story as well. It said, “Some ICE employees believe that the shift in priorities is driven by political preoccupation with deportation numbers rather than keeping communities safe.” I don’t know who the ones are who don’t think that’s what it is, just to be really clear. They’re very clear what this is here. Again, we are not talking about a process where we are saying the goal here should be an immigration system where we’re giving people legal status and a process that they can go through if it has a background check. That’s what we should be getting toward. And look, there is no humane or just or fair or orderly immigration enforcement mechanism when there’s 14 million people who are undocumented. That’s why what they’re doing, number one, is incredibly unpopular—and we can just talk about that. And number two, what is really popular is, yeah, we should have a functioning legal immigration system. We should have a smart and secure approach to border security, but we should have a process that people can go through who are building their lives here to earn status and citizenship. And that’s what I want to be talking about and, and Democrats should be talking about too.
I think it’s just so important when you hear this that the people who are supposed to be—they claim—focused on things are just saying, Hey, this is about numbers. Let’s be real, that’s incredibly harmful. And I think you’re seeing the American public in places like Los Angeles and across the country turn against that.
Sargent: If I understand you correctly, you’re saying there are two sides to the coin here. On the one side, you’re hearing from all these ICE officials who are demoralized and we’re hearing from the public a similar message: Why the hell are we going after the grandmothers, the carpenters, the day laborers, and so forth? Everybody’s reacting badly to that. But what people don’t seem to understand is that the other side of this coin is that there aren’t pathways to legal status for so many of these people. That’s the real essence of the problem. You even got people like Joe Rogan noticing that this is the problem. So if I understand you correctly, the point would be to talk about people’s dismay over the targeting of all these low-level people, and then let people know—let voters know—that there are other options, that we could be making it easier for them to get right with the law and easier for them to build lives here peacefully and so forth, right?
Schulte: That’s right. I think it’s so important to just remind ourselves the immigration system is confusing. It is chaotic. And it’s our job to remind people [that] for the vast majority of people who are undocumented, they’ve lived in this country for a really long time but they don’t have the ability to get right with the law. They don’t have the ability to get legal status. That’s why we need to change the laws and have a process that people can go through. And look, we can go back and forth about the exact parameters of that—but at its core, the reason that a path to legal status, a path to citizenship is popular is because most people think it exists already for some people or it should exist for others. And I don’t want to have a conversation about whether or not if someone is picked up and they work at a farm or at a Home Depot or they’re at home they should or shouldn’t fear deportation. We should be having a conversation about how we can get those people a process so that they can have the dignity and certainty to live their lives and contribute like everybody else. And if we do that, then we’re going to actually have a system of immigration laws that can ultimately make sense. And until that, we are going to see these cycles of chaos that are designed to provoke and [that] lead to really dangerous places outside the immigration system as well. When you’re talking about this mass criminalization and this mass expansion [of] law enforcement, it’s really scary stuff.
Sargent: I think Trump knows that he’s got a problem here as well with the ICE morale issue and with the unpopularity of what we’re talking about here. Trump’s been spending a lot of time tweeting out this crap about how ICE officers are getting attacked. His propagandists are pushing all these numbers about those supposed attacks on ICE officers, and the numbers just don’t add up. They’re all bullshit. The other day he said they’re under “daily violent assault,” right? The real victims in this country are ICE agents. This seems designed to help boost morale inside ICE, I guess, but it isn’t working, clearly. I want to flag one other thing that an ICE officer said in The Atlantic piece. He said people are demoralized by the fact that they’re basically being turned into a “goon squad.” I got to think that a lot of these ICE officers didn’t quite think they signed up for going after carpenters and grandmothers. Todd, can you shed some light on this? To what degree are ICE officers in the grip of the same ideological fervor as Miller is? I tend to think they aren’t. Don’t most of them think of themselves as going after real bad guys? What’s the real story there?
Schulte: So I don’t want to get into pretending to know what’s in the hearts and minds of individuals—and I’m sure it varies a lot. What I will say is I think people should take very seriously the direction they’re getting from the very top of this administration, whether it’s the president; whether it’s comments [about] mass deportations continuing and expanding; whether it’s the vice president who said the core of the policies they’ve been trying to put forth are mass deportation; whether it is the videos that you’ve seen put out on social media that have quoted the prophet Isaiah and have shown immigration enforcement agents in what I can—it’s a family podcast, so I will refer to as a horrific hype video talking about how immigration enforcement is a type of biblical justice that they are inflicting upon American communities; or whether or not it’s like the memeification of the shackling of human beings. I think people should take [that] very seriously—whatever they think they signed up for, that is what they are being asked to do right now—and make their choices accordingly. And what I can say is what I see from the American public: [This] is incredibly unpopular and designed to provoke, which, I think we should talk about here, is what you see in different places now.
Sargent: That memeification of the shackling of human beings is really dark, and I just want to pick up on it for one second. They’re memeifying all sorts of different cruelties toward immigrants right now. They’re memeifying Kristi Noem getting all dressed up in some bizarre getup and posing in front of tattooed migrants in prison cells. They’re memeifying the frog-marching of migrants onto deportation planes. I think there’s a connection between that and the broader unpopularity you’re talking about here. For the MAGA movement, all this stuff is thrilling—these memes, right? They are in the grip of the same ideological fervor as Stephen Miller is. They believe the presence of undocumented immigrants in this country—their mere presence—is a civilizational emergency, a dire threat to the makeup of the country that they want. But the broader public doesn’t see it that way. The broader public sees them as grandmothers and carpenters and day laborers. The broader public doesn’t have a problem with their presence here, and that, to me, is the big schism between MAGA and the rest of the country on this that you see so disgustingly and glaringly illustrated with those awful memes. There’s no chance that your average swing voter thrills to those images. No chance at all, I think.
Schulte: I can’t agree more. And I also think it’s important to remember we have the advantage of knowing that Donald Trump was president before. When the president went forth with a plan to try to repeal DACA in 2017, the pushback was so broad and intense that the next day, he was like, Love the Dreamers. Congress, act! and he was doing TV shows [eating] Chinese food dinners, trying to say he was a big dealmaker. And that didn’t happen, but DACA remains today. When family separation happened at the border, the pushback was even more intense, and the president, to this day, will say he wants to avoid family separation.
Now, families are being separated every day as a result of his actions, but I think the point of there’s a very serious and incredibly unpopular policy architecture that has evolved over many years to restrict immigration, to make life so miserable for immigrants that they choose to leave, and, quite frankly, to marginalize immigrants so much that it fuels this further demagoguery.… You take away status from people. You make it so they don’t have the ability to pay their rent. People are unstable. They’re going to come into contact with the criminal justice system. So you can justify not just ICE going out and taking people but state and local law enforcement and the National Guard having to do this stuff. These downward cycles and spirals they want to push people into to fuel a propaganda machine—and it’s important to call that out for what it is.
Sargent: Yeah.
Schulte: And we have a better policy, and we have a better political approach—and that’s before we get to so many other things and issues. And it’s why instead of demonizing people, instead of going to ChatGPT and making memes of immigrants here, we should give people legal status. That’s got to be the answer at the end of the day here. And it’s such a good political answer, too, and it helps millions of people.
Sargent: Just to close this out, let’s look forward for a second. The big bill that Donald Trump just passed is cranking at least $150 billion into Trump’s border and immigration agenda. We’re looking at $45 billion for new detention facilities. What do you expect to happen with all that money? It does seem like a lot of people inside ICE don’t want to be turned into this army of people that are being asked to make war on people who really are, for all intents and purposes, living quiet, peaceful lives in American communities. Where does it all go?
Schulte: I think it’s going to go in incredibly harmful and chaotic ways. I wish I had an optimistic message for people. And I think it’s our job to stop what we can, to slow what we can to reduce harm, but it’s also to gather people up and tell a story about these harms. This week, when they take temporary protected status away from Nicaraguans and Hondurans—people who’ve been in this country on average for 31 years—those are the people who, when they go from having a $3.4 billion ICE jail and detention budget to a $45 billion budget, are going to end up on a private prison run on a military base in the United States. Those are the people who are going to get picked up because there’s a huge block grant to a sheriff’s department. Those are the people who are going to have to say goodbye to their families and make terrible choices here.
So this is at a time when, again, status is being taken away from millions of people. We’re dismantling basic constitutional protections. We are dramatically expanding a deportation machinery to where, when the president of the U.S is meeting with leaders from Africa, a central thing is, We need you to take people to your country who aren’t from there. What we’re trying to see here is how we fight back and push back against this effort here because it is an effort to sow chaos—and we’re going to see the supercharged effort. And so I think the important thing for policymakers, for people listening to do is to also understand they can make a difference. If you look at Los Angeles, I think the people who are going and signing up at corners to fight for day laborers are doing incredible work there. And so I encourage everybody to know [that] you can [play] a big role in your local communities—and to be inspired by activists and people who’d never thought about this issue before to show, I’m not going to have this money go and harm people in my community. I’m going to stand up for the basic decency of my community, whether it’s people born in the U.S. or not.
Sargent: It is such an important message. Everybody’s got to get in this game. Everybody’s got to get in this fight right now. It’s going to be all-consuming for the next few years, and it’s going to be really, really intense. Todd Schulte, thanks for straightening us out on all this stuff. Appreciate it.
Schulte: Thanks so much.