The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 25 episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon. (Due to technical difficulties, we don’t have a video of this conversation.)
Bacon: Let’s talk about your constituent [Kilmar Abrego Garcia] What happened this morning? I guess he’s been detained now. Talk about what you have heard about him specifically so far.
Rep. Glenn Ivey: Well, at this point we’re just following reports. That they’ve detained him and they’re going to deport him is our understanding. I haven’t heard any official confirmation on that, but that’s what we’re hearing.
Bacon: To Uganda or where? Or you don’t know?
Ivey: Uganda. Yeah.
Bacon: OK. Wow.
Ivey: Uganda. That’s what we’re hearing. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. We’ll have to wait for a tweet from the president, I suppose, ’cause that’s the only way he does official communications: on Twitter or X or whatever they call it now.
Bacon: Just for the average person, why is this so concerning?
Ivey: Well, because the Trump administration is doing everything it can to keep him from having his day in court. They’ve been accusing him of being MS-13. The secretary said he is a “monster.” They dropped all these federal charges on him. They’re doing everything they can to actually keep him from having a chance to get the day in court that the Supreme Court said he should get. So when they brought him to Tennessee after they charged him, the judge there looked at the charges to make a determination about whether he should be released or not and how the case should go forward now. They’ve charged him with human trafficking and all these serious felonies. The judge looked at the case and said, I don’t think he’s a threat to public safety. That’s one of the two things the judges have to look at when they make the bail of determinations. And the second was, I don’t think he’s a flight risk. I think he can go back to Maryland.
What that says to me is that this judge didn’t think this was such a strong case. And the fact that they’re trying to pressure him with this deportation to Uganda, a place that he’s never been and apparently the jail conditions over there are horrific—clearly they’re just trying to pressure him into taking a plea so they don’t have to come into court and prove the case that they said they could prove. They’re afraid to go to court. They’re afraid to have their case evaluated by a judge and a jury.
Bacon: You went to a rally this morning for him? Is that what you went to?
Ivey: Yeah, kind of a rally. It was right before he went into into the building into ICE. That’s the same building, ironically, that we went to meet our two senators and three other members a couple of weeks ago to try and get a chance to tour the detention facility, which they refused. So it’s a little ironic that it’s the same building.
Bacon: And basically what’s happened here is they do not have anything. He’s committed no crime, but they can’t concede that, right? He’s committed no crime, done nothing wrong, but they’d rather deport him than admit that they were wrong.
Ivey: Well, they’ve charged him with a crime.
Bacon: Yeah.
Ivey: So they would say he’s committed a crime—but he certainly hasn’t been convicted of a crime. And if you go back to the beginning of all of this, the deportation was illegal, which they had to acknowledge in court. But rather than just bring him back and fix the problem, they kept saying they couldn’t bring him back, they didn’t have the authority to bring him back. The Supreme Court said, You’ve got bring him back. The Fourth Circuit said, You’ve got to bring him back. He gets his day in court. So they trumped up these charges—pardon the pun—so they could bring him back and save face. But then they brought him back, and he’s like, OK, well, give me my day in court. Then they’re like, Geez, we don’t want to do that either, so let’s send him to a country where he’ll never be heard from again. That looks like what they’re trying to do.
Bacon: Talk about the National Guard. I know you’re in the suburbs above D.C., not D.C. proper, but talk about what that’s like and why we should be concerned about that.
Ivey: Yeah. I was in D.C. yesterday—two of my kids live in D.C., by the way; my grandson’s in D.C. and the like—and we were down on the wharf. And I saw, I don’t know, 30 or so of these guys walking around in groups of between three and five mainly. There was one time where it was a group of eight. First of all, I was with a guy who works in the restaurant business in D.C. and he says nobody’s here. This is shocking that there’s so few people here. And I know it’s been very damaging to the restaurants. They’ve had to extend the restaurant week, but seeing guys walking around on American streets in full camo—this looks like they just got pulled off the front line of some combat theater. And they’re carrying … I’m not a gun guy, but I would say either an M4 or an M16, military assault weapons. And some of them had 9mm handguns strapped on. I’m just not used to seeing that kind of firepower on American streets. That’s not what’s going on. That’s problem number one.
Problem number two is when I looked at their belts, they didn’t have anything other than firearms. So in a civilian police context where you have a force continuum, you don’t go right to shoot the guy. You go to—Well, we got tasers, we’ve got pepper spray, we’ve got other options. We’ve got nightstick that aren’t deadly force that we can use depending on the situation. And the firearm is the last resort. For these guys, it’s the only resort. That’s all they have. And then there’s the training issue. Now, you know the president—they’re saying they’re going to train them [on] how to deal with civilian contacts, but they haven’t trained them yet. And even if they had trained them, they don’t have the tools to do non–lethal force in most situations. And by the way, if you fire one of those assault weapons guns in a context like the wharf, the bullet goes right through the target and keeps going. So the chances of hitting some innocent bystander jump exponentially when you are using firearms with that kind of power in that kind of environment.
So for me, it was this is why we don’t have military policing our streets. And then the last point I’ll make on this one is, last time I checked, the wharf was not a hotspot.
Bacon: Yes.
Ivey: I’m seeing these guys—it looks like they’re tourists in town. They’re at the Washington Monument or Union Station or in front of the Supreme Court, all the iconic things that make for great photos and great political theater, I guess, for MAGA Republican America. But if you really want to try and help with the crime problem, that’s not where it is and those aren’t the right guys to do it. The guys to do that would be—I did see some DEA on the street. Although, again, they’re in camo outfits, street patrol is not what they’re trained to do and it’s not the highest and best use of their capabilities. Same with FBI agents. When I was a local prosecutor in D.C., when I was at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, we had task forces where you worked with the FBI and the DEA and the local police all the time. U.S. Marshals as well. And those can be great and very effective and very powerful. But let ’em have their role. It’s like, don’t let Michael Jordan inbound the ball. What are we doing here? Put ’em in a position where they can do the most good work for the community.
Bacon: Sounds like troops are now coming to potentially Chicago, Baltimore. What do you make of this general trend?
Ivey: Well, it’s a stupid abuse of the military power. It’s enormously expensive. The quote I heard was $1 million a day just for D.C. And let’s start with this. Crime’s gone down in the U.S. pretty significantly in the last few years, but we have a major crime problem. I was a prosecutor for 12 years of my career, state and federal. No question it’s an issue. How do you fix it? Well, more cops. This doesn’t help with that, especially D.C., ’cause instead of releasing the $1.1 billion that the mayor said she would use to hire cops at least in part, they’re hanging onto that. Number two, you’re not putting people on the street who can help with civilian policing to address the actual things you say are the problem—let’s say it’s murder, carjacking, or whatever. These are guys walking around as tourists, really doing nothing to address the situation. Number three, you’re not putting people on the types of task forces and teams that would be helpful to local police to actually target the violent criminal offenders.
And then number four, you need a comprehensive approach to violence reductions on the street. It’s not just enforcement. Intervention and prevention programs can be extraordinarily helpful with that. But instead of funding that, Trump got in office and the first thing he did was cut the Biden [administration’s] Office of Gun Violence Prevention. First thing he did was cut that. And then of course they won’t take any steps to address guns on the street. Take ghost guns. Last I looked, there were 180 sponsors for a ghost gun ban at the federal level. How many Republicans? Zero. And everybody know ghost guns. They’re made to help criminals evade being caught when they use the gun. You can’t even work to ban that—you can’t even work to get that off the street. I mean, come on.
And then, I forgot this part, I’m watching what these guys are doing and they’re grabbing—ICE is grabbing people off the streets. I guess apparently right now, they’re targeting pizza delivery guys. Yeah. Wow, we got some pizza delivery guys. City’s a lot safer now, isn’t it? You got the pepperoni off the streets. It’s ridiculous. It would be pathetic if it weren’t true. It is just incredible.
Bacon: Your staff told me you’ve got to go in 10. So the last question is what should we do about this? Like how crazy they’ve gone going after pizza delivery guys. What can—not just Democrats in Congress, but what should the country be trying to do to challenge this?
Ivey: Well, I think in part, the messages that they can send to their elected officials is a big step, especially if they’re in red states or have Republican representatives. Hey, Congressman or Senator so-and-so, this is a big waste of dollars. Get these guys back in the mission that they’re supposed to be carrying out—the National Guard. And it’s not civilian law enforcement patrol. If we want to do more, do that. Let’s take Tennessee for example. Tennessee sent National Guard troops up here, but Memphis apparently has a much worse capital murder problem than we do in Washington D.C. And if I recall correctly, Memphis was the place where they had the five guys that beat—I forget the man’s name, but beat him to death. So that police department’s in need a reform. But guess what Donald Trump did? He shut down DOJ intervention efforts to try and help with the consent decree reform for local police departments, including that one.
So all you can do is hope that people will finally see through the show that he’s trying to put on and say, OK, yeah, we want to reduce crime. We know this isn’t the way to do it. Let’s get back on track. I think the poll in the D.C. crowd was 80 percent, but he doesn’t really care about that ’cause D.C. doesn’t have a red influence on it. But we need our Republicans in Congress to stand up and say something about this just like the cuts to Medicaid. Just like the cuts to Obamacare. Just like the tariffs he’s put in place, just taking money out of their pockets. And if they won’t do it, they need to be replaced by Democrats.
Bacon: Congressman ...Thank you.