The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 2 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.
Donald Trump seems to be in deep denial about how unpopular his ICE raids have become. He let out a long, strange, rambling tirade to reporters about how the “silent majority” is still behind what ICE is doing. He also lied uncontrollably about the protesters, about crime in Minneapolis, and much more. Interestingly, this comes as a poll from none other than Fox News just delivered Trump some very bad news on this front. It finds that even his base voters are turning against ICE in a big way as well. Are we in the middle of a watershed moment on public opinion when it comes to immigration? We’re talking about this with Lia Parada, an immigration advocate who’s worked on these issues for a long time and now represents groups losing their status under Trump. Leah, nice to have you on.
Lia Parada: Thanks for having me on, Greg.
Sargent: All right. So let’s first listen to this really strange rant from Trump.
Donald Trump (voiceover): We’ll say it very plainly, elections have consequences. The people want law and order. And we have a silent majority. You know, we have a silent majority of people. They don’t go on riot and everything else, but they like what we’re doing. They like having a safe city. I get calls every single day. Every person I see working in the White House, people I don’t know, many people work here, and they say, ‘I’d like to thank you, sir, you’ve made Washington so great. We walk to work. They walk to work.’ Every person in his building. I mean, virtually every time I see somebody, they thank me because a year and a half ago they lived in hell and now they can walk to work and they’re totally safe. Nothing’s going to happen.
Sargent: Lia, let’s start with the funny part first. Trump actually says that “the people in the building” compliment what he’s doing for D.C.—meaning the people who work in the White House. And he presents this as if it means something in terms of public opinion. That’s pretty wild, isn’t it?
Parada: Yeah, we’re really grasping at straws here for public opinion when you’re citing the support of your court—of the “King’s Court”—to say that, you know, he’s on the right side of this.
Sargent: Yeah, I mean, you know, these are people who spend all day every day sucking up to him and manipulating him. And so he actually thinks it means something for them to say, Sir, you’ve done a wonderful job cleaning up D.C.; I can now walk to work, sir.
Note that Trump there also floated this idea that the “silent majority” is behind the ICE raids. But it’s clear that some inside the White House political operation are telling Trump, Sorry, sir, you’ve lost the public on this, sir. Yet it looks like he and Miller do still believe this. What do you make of that, Lia?
Parada: I really think that this is what they have left to justify a strategy that they are completely locked into. He has locked himself into this position; he has locked arms with Stephen Miller. This was a key part of his campaign—we all saw the “Mass Deportation Now” posters—and then his signature legislation awarded this agency more money than most militaries of other countries. And so they are desperate to justify what is happening right now. And they are seeing that the “vocal majority” are 100 percent against what they’re saying.
Sargent: I think that’s a critical point that we should dwell on a sec. They are locked into this in the sense that they have gotten Congress to appropriate truly enormous sums of money for this operation. And that is now being spent. They’re scaling up ICE in a major way. They’re buying—who knows what the hell—equipment, weaponry?
They’re talking about buying warehouses now to put people in detention, even though right now the detention system is absolutely maxed out at, I think, over 60,000. This is something that is becoming kind of a non-controllable carceral state—a real kind of juggernaut that can’t really be controlled anymore. And I think they’re on the verge of losing control of this. It reminds me a little bit of what happened with the buildup of the War on Terror bureaucracy under George W. Bush. Does that sound right to you?
Parada: That sounds exactly right. This is a runaway train. They have lost control. Even when Trump tries to be surgical in enforcement actions, that is not what happens on the ground. And by doing so, they’re organizing the opposition. This police state is actually creating opposition. I wouldn’t even say across party lines; I’d say regardless of party lines.
I just met with some organizers in Roxbury, New Jersey, where a town council of all Republicans stood up and said that they were opposing the warehouse being opened up there. And then in Hanover, in Virginia—everything is frozen in Virginia right now; I can barely get out of my driveway—literally hundreds of people turned out to a town council meeting. And the vote out of the town council in a really deep-red part of Virginia was that, no, they do not want the warehouse.
And so the videos that—I don’t know what the administration thought they would accomplish by taping all of the abuses—but by doing so, they are turning people against what is happening because it’s no longer viewed as reasonable or “law and order.” It is like a terrifying police state that no one thinks they are safe under.
Sargent: Just to be clear for listeners, you’re talking here about these warehouses that ICE is now scaling up. There’s one in Jersey, one in Virginia that you’re saying that local town councils oppose, right?
Parada: Yes. And these are like majority-Republican town councils.
Sargent: Yeah, that’s fascinating. And in fact, that brings me to the new Fox News poll, which finds that 59 percent of voters say that ICE is being “too aggressive” in its deportations. And get this: 71 percent of independents say the same.
55 percent of overall voters disapprove of Trump on immigration, versus 45 percent who approve. That puts him 10 points underwater. And again, 71 percent of independents disapprove. That’s really something. Lia, you’ve been following public opinion on immigration for a long time. This seems a little like something new, doesn’t it?
Parada: Absolutely. And I was working as an advocate during family separation under the first Trump administration, and I really thought that that was the most—the highest, most impactful watershed moment. And I really think that we haven’t reached the heights of what opposition will look like, just because we know that they are not going to stop what they’re doing.
And everyday Americans are actually now paying attention because—I mean, whether you’re talking about the Second Amendment or “big government,” which is typically a, like, Republican/independent talking point, that’s been thrown into this conversation. So we’re talking about sick children in abusive detention conditions, American veteran nurses being shot in broad daylight broadcast all over social media—and they haven’t even spent a fraction of the funds that they have to carry out this, this overall agenda.
Sargent: Right. It’s going to get bigger. I was absolutely shocked when I looked at these additional numbers in the Fox poll: 50 percent of rural whites say ICE is too aggressive, and 55 percent of whites without a college degree say the same. That’s reaching very deep into Trump’s base.
Lia, we’ve been told for a long time that Democrats need to understand that immigration is a big reason they’re losing working-class voters, particularly white ones. But here they’re turning on Trump over immigration.
Now, I get that part of this is a passing reaction to the horrors we’re seeing in the news and all that, but it sure looks like there’s an opening for Democrats to reach out to these voters on this. Do you think there’s an opening like that? And what should Democrats do?
Parada: There’s an opening, and there’s always been an opening. I think that really in the past, what Democrats have failed to do is really understand the nuance of the issue. I am not surprised to hear that rural voters are against what’s happening. You know what’s also in rural America? Farmworkers who are people of faith that they go to church with. Immigrants are a part of our nation, a part of our community. And so when they see things happening to their neighbors, they recoil against it.
What—you know, I really, you know, think that the balanced approach on immigration is really where most of America is at. They want to see secure borders. They want to understand that there is a lawful, reasonable process for folks. So they don’t want to see the process—the system—being taken advantage of, whether it is children and families being disappeared or seemingly, quote-unquote, “open borders.”
And so this is a huge opportunity for Democrats. And I hope that they won’t take this moment and say—you know, think that they are just going to win a short-term messaging battle and move on to other issues. They will fight for solutions that matter. As a Latina who worked really hard in these last few electoral cycles, I had calls where it’s like, Don’t come to me with that immigration reform talk about Democrats; no one believes that that’s something that they care about.
They only use it as a talking point when elections come around. And so this is a challenge for Democrats to take this moment seriously—to really understand what the opposition is about. You can’t just retweet something and walk away and not come back to the issue. They truly have to invest in the solutions and, like, organizing around it as well.
Sargent: Yeah. And I want to add here that I think that what Democrats need to be doing right now is taking this opportunity to say, “There’s another way to do this,” right? And that sort of entails saying something a lot more than just, “My God, paramilitary ICE officers are killing Americans and that’s horrible.”
It also entails saying, “You know what? Mass deportations—Trump’s mass deportations—are a failure.” And I think Democrats can say that and say that what we need to be doing now is giving people who have lived in this country a long time, who don’t have a criminal record, who have jobs and so forth—giving them a way to get right with the law. There’s an opening to make that case now. And I want to hear that from Dems.
Sargent: And you know, I was actually surprised to see—we all watched with bated breath what Senator Fetterman was going to say with this DHS funding debate. And he actually had a reasonable response, which is: I want to see ICE do what its job is, but I don’t want to see families harmed. And also people who have been here for a long time should be on a pathway to citizenship.
Which, you know, as of maybe two, three years ago, that was what the standard policy position was for Democrats. And they abandoned it to follow “border security” and honestly just fell into the Republicans’ trap.
Parada: Well, just so listeners understand where this is coming from, Senator Fetterman has been extremely disappointing to a lot of Democrats because he seems to be lurching to the right in many ways. And so for him to be saying that is a real statement. He’s the Pennsylvania senator; he does pretty well in rural areas. And for him to say that a path to citizenship is the way forward for all these people rather than deportations is promising—and more Democrats need to say that.
Parada: And it’s really important that they do that because we can’t just—as you said—we can’t just, like, respond to the moment that we’re in and leave it at that and hope that public opinion will shape itself. They have to lead the narrative and lead with solutions and start talking about: what is the opposite of mass deportation?
What is the opposite of taking people who’ve been here a long time—whether they be DACA holders, TPS holders, and some sort of semi-legal status—and rip them out of their communities and deport them? Or give them a process to come forward and be permanent members of our society and go through a process to make them U.S. citizens?
That doesn’t exist now. And that is why we’re caught in the worst of all worlds. And we’re seeing what actually happens when America buys into what the far-right strategy is on immigration.
Sargent: There is absolutely an opening to remake this case. So let’s listen to a little bit more of Trump.
Donald Trump (voiceover): But do these people really want to have rapists? Do they really want to have drug dealers and people from prisons and murderers? Do they really want to have them in the community? You know, it’s really insurrectionists and agitators and they’re paid. And you can tell a lot of reasons. Some of them are professionals, you know, with their mouth. But they’re also, you look at the signs, the signs are all professionally made. They have signs that are gorgeous. In fact, I want to get the sign because I’m the big… I need a lot of signs for different things and I want to find out whoever does their signs, they do a beautiful job. You know, everybody has this beautiful sign with brand new wood. It’s like leather handles… they have a leather handle on the bottom.
Sargent: What strikes me here is how they’re just running out of arguments. They just keep repeating over and over that everyone in Minneapolis is a criminal and that all the protesters are—hey, it’s like they’re not even trying to win this argument anymore. It’s like they’ve basically given up on winning back the middle of the country on the issue. What do you make of that?
Parada: I think it’s hilarious that he’s caught up on the “quality” of poster signs as his response to the very real, organic, grassroots opposition to what’s happening in Minneapolis and across the country. I myself have seen that most of the public opposition is not, you know, organized by advocacy groups. It is everyday people who are coming out and speaking out against what’s happening.
Parada: I really believe that all the mobilizing that’s happening to call your member of Congress will turn into energy to turn people out to vote. Democrats need to have a message that keeps the support there, that sustains it, that supports where people are at. But what is happening on the ground is just so appalling to people that it doesn’t feel like it’s just about immigration—it feels like it’s more about sustaining our democracy.
It’s really like... “I can’t believe this is our country” is pretty much what I hear across the board. It’s not like, “You know, how do I feel about immigrants?” And so I think that they have used immigration as a means to, you know, hack away at the Constitution and our democracy. And people are seeing it and are just completely motivated by it and horrified that this is our country.
We are exceeding where we were at family separation. When family separation was happening, it was wall-to-wall coverage. Cindy McCain was on TV saying that it’s outrageous and they needed to stop what they were doing. And so the—I think the volume and the intensity of the opposition is so much larger now than it was under family separation.
But also, it’s so much more impactful, like the human harm that is happening. families are being separated, children are being harmed, detention centers are opening across the country, citizens are being beat up for fighting for their rights or just being a person of color driving to work in Minneapolis. And so it’s so much bigger in many ways—the impact of the policy itself, the gargantuan policies—and that also leads to a broader opposition because it impacts so many more people.
Parada: I feel the same way. Thanks for having me on, Greg.