The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 3 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.
It’s now becoming clear that in the Trump MAGA worldview, ICE is supposed to function as far more than an immigration enforcement agency. It’s seen as an instrument of authoritarian state terror. We think this was neatly captured by a long monologue that Donald Trump unleashed about supposed vote cheating by undocumented immigrants, which he accompanied with a very dark threat. This moment comes, not coincidentally, as MAGA figures are ramping up their demands for a more vicious ICE crackdown. We’re working through what all this means today with reporter Gillian Brockell, who reports regularly on ICE and has a new piece arguing that the agency is getting more cruel carrying out its basic duties. Gillian, nice to have you on.
Gillian Brockell: Thank you for having me.
Sargent: So let’s start with something that Donald Trump said to a right-wing podcaster about undocumented immigrants. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (voiceover): These people were brought to our country to vote and they vote illegally. And the you know, amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say we want to take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many… 15 places, the Republicans ought to nationalize the voting and that we have states that are so crooked and the county votes. We have states that I won. that Joe I didn’t win. Now you’re to see something in Georgia where they were able to get with the court order and the ballots. You’re see some interesting things come out.
Sargent: So there, Trump falsely claims undocumented immigrants are voting illegally, then calls on the GOP Congress to somehow take over the voting in numerous jurisdictions. And he says something’s going to be happening in Georgia. Gillian, just putting aside whether Trump can actually succeed in any of this—it’s pretty stark and lawless that he’s demanding it, don’t you think?
Brockell: Yeah, of course. I mean, it was a huge scandal in 2020 when there was a secret phone call where he was trying to mess with votes in Georgia, you know, that the Washington Post reported at the time, right? The “find however many votes.” You know, that was a massive scandal. Now he’s just doing it in public. You know, now he’s just, sort of, wish-casting about it, you know, talking to Dan Bongino.
Sargent: Yeah, and we should probably point out who Dan Bongino is again.
Brockell: You know, it’s funny because he’s been able to have a pundit career based on having been in law enforcement briefly—and then was, what, deputy director of the FBI in the second Trump administration, but couldn’t hack it and had to go back to podcasting. So I’m glad he’s back where he’s most comfortable, I guess.
Sargent: And he certainly segued into it pretty effortlessly after being a very high-level law enforcement official for Trump. So note that Trump also ties this demand for Republicans to take over elections to a bunch of typical lies. One about undocumented immigrants voting; another about how he won states in 2020 that he lost.
He’s talking in part about Somalis in Minnesota because that’s a state he sometimes claims he won, which he didn’t. But Gillian, I think you see here the ICE crackdown in Minnesota—the deliberate use of violence and terror to subjugate populations that Trump and MAGA hate—kind of dovetailing with Trump-MAGA authoritarianism on the electoral front. You take all this together and he’s clearly threatening to try to use ICE to disrupt the midterm elections.
And of course, on top of that, you have the FBI investigating Georgia in some way, seizing a lot of 2020 ballots for some unexplained reason. And now, Gillian, the New York Times reports that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was on the scene of that FBI raid and set it up so Trump could talk to the FBI agents. Gillian, what’s the true nature of this bundle of threats here, do you think?
Brockell: Look, I mean, I think that it’s terrifying because we have a bunch of fascist leaders who are trying to consolidate power. But I do tend to be more of the view of Jamelle Bouie about their actual ability to achieve what he would like—it’s just not there. I mean, if you just look at the number of ICE agents that there are, even if they are deployed as a secret police to sort of take over the midterm elections, there simply aren’t enough agents to be able to do that at enough of the polling centers.
They just don’t have the manpower. As Jamelle also said, Trump can send something to a secretary of state saying, “We’re nationalizing the election in your state now.” And that secretary of state can just say no, right?
There’s no mechanism for him to actually press a button and now I’m managing those votes, I’m counting, you know, those votes. There’s no mechanism to do that. And as terrifying as these ICE agents are, there’s just not enough of them to actually take over an election.
Sargent: Right. I think I absolutely agree with that. I think that nature of the threat is it can take another direction as well, which is He’s just gonna try to use ICE in some sense to create the sort of disruption that potentially foments a crisis atmosphere that-
Brockell: Yeah, voter intimidation, absolutely.
Sargent: Right, voter intimidation—and then also creating an atmosphere of crisis in particular jurisdictions, maybe where there are competitive House contests that maybe... a crisis that sort of favors Republicans in some sense. Although I’ve gotta say, at this point, I think that they’ve overshot so badly that any sense of crisis that they create works against them.
Brockell: Yeah, I mean, you know, let’s not count our chickens before they hatch, but like the midterms are likely to be such an overwhelming win for Democrats that, you know, even if they can disrupt a couple of congressional elections—you know, probably blue districts in a red state—you know, it doesn’t seem like they can actually, you know, really stop this wave that is coming at them that they created through their own cruelty, through their own, you know, fascist behavior.
Sargent: Well, I want to bring in what some MAGA figures are saying because it’s not a coincidence that they’re saying this at the moment that Trump is making threats like this. This is documented by Media Matters. They’re being quite explicit in their calls for more ICE brutality. Here’s Laura Ingraham.
Laura Ingraham (voiceover): So how do you defeat these well-funded, well-organized revolutionaries? Well, certainly not by caving, that’s for darn sure, but that’s exactly what people like liberal Republican Susan Collins wants. But we defeat the revolution by staying the course, by prosecuting criminal conspiracies to impede ICE, and also their funding networks.
Sargent: In short, urging law enforcement to go after liberal groups. Here’s Tucker Carlson. He says Minnesota protesters want the chaos.
Tucker Carlson (voiceover): This is proof that what you’re watching is not a series of protests about immigration. What you’re watching are the beginnings of a color revolution, of a kind of insurrection against federal authority.
Sargent: He says that if this isn’t stopped, the result will be civil war and killing at scale. And here’s Steve Bannon.
Steve Bannon (voiceover): In the fog of war, right? Just look through it. We have to hold the line. There can be no de-escalation at all. You don’t need to bring down the temperature. Raise the temperature.
Sargent: Gillian, that’s pretty clear. They are absolutely saturated in bloodlust, and they’re not hiding it.
Brockell: Yeah. And I think that, you know, for many years they may have been able to convince some people to go along with that. Immigrants have been used by the Republican Party and by conservatives for a long time as this sort of “boogeyman” to win elections. And Democrats have just sort of been like, “What if we just don’t talk about immigration at all?”
And then they’ve totally avoided the issue instead of, you know, taking any kind of moral claim here by actually speaking honestly about what is happening—what people can see with their own eyes, in their own Home Depot parking lots—you know, seeing just the abuse, seeing their neighbors disappear, seeing all these videos, seeing American citizens being shot, seeing American citizens arrested in boxer shorts and blankets in the middle of the winter.
I mean, there’s an opportunity to make a moral claim and say, “No, you may have fallen for this boogeyman for a long time, but now you see it doesn’t exist.” Immigrants are not our enemies and we can vote to stop this right now. We just need Democrats to stop avoiding the subject of immigration.
Sargent: Yeah. And I think that’s going to be changing. What do you make of the fact that MAGA’s bloodlust is right out in the open? They’re coming right out and saying, “We want more ICE brutality.”
Brockell: My hope is that the people who have been, sort of, falling for this for a long time will finally see how morally bankrupt it is, how evil it is. And hopefully someday justice will come for the people who are calling for this. But I don’t think there are that many people who are buying this anymore.
Sargent: I think that’s right. Well, let’s talk about your piece. You had a piece from Mother Jones that talked about how ICE deportation flights are getting longer and they’re getting crueler. I think it’s very clear at this point that Trump and especially Stephen Miller and MAGA see ICE’s role explicitly as a dispenser of authoritarian “sadism,” I guess is one way to put it. Can you talk about what you found and about that broader role ICE is taking on in the MAGAverse?
Brockell: Sure. So what I do is I track ICE flights, and this story in Mother Jones is about a company called Omni Air International. But the thing about ICE flights is that every single immigrant—every single adult, and some children—on ICE flights are shackled at the wrists and ankles, attached to a chain around their waists. This is incredibly dangerous. They can’t evacuate in an emergency; they couldn’t reach an oxygen mask if they had to.
There are five to 30 ICE agents and ICE-contracted guards on every one of these flights. And something that we hear from the migrants on board is that they are physically abused—they are verbally abused. Omni has been doing these flights for ICE for years. What I found is that they were bought by a private equity firm in the middle of April. And since then, their ICE flights have quadrupled and they’re getting longer—which is a huge problem since these people are shackled.
I spoke with a forensic pathologist who is an expert on restraint, and she talked about [how] if you’re shackled for a couple of hours, you can experience bruising, chafing, you can get permanent nerve damage. Another huge problem is blood clots. How many times have you been on an international flight and you’re told, “Wear special compression socks and get up and walk around, make sure you’re hydrated enough”? Well, they can’t do that on these flights. They’re not allowed to stand up.
If they stand up—I spoke to a man who was deported to Laos; he said every time anyone that... people were crying out in pain from the shackling. And if they tried to stand up to stretch, the guards would just say, “Sit the fuck down,” and wouldn’t let them stand and move.
And so it’s just extremely painful. And so this man—he was shackled for more than 73 hours on his removal flight. They’re doing multiple stops now. I tracked a flight in September that did nine stops. And the people on the last stop—they’ve been shackled the whole time.
Sargent: So what I get from this reporting and from the other stuff we’re seeing is the degree to which ICE deliberately dehumanizes people. I think we’d be kidding ourselves if we don’t face this squarely. This dehumanization is why MAGA media figures are so excited about ICE’s crackdowns.
Beyond the flights, in a very general sense, these MAGA figures see ICE as a dehumanization force to be unleashed on the parts of America they consider to be “enemy territory” to be conquered. Isn’t that what ICE is becoming in the Trump—Stephen Miller—MAGA worldview?
Brockell: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, with these flights, too, you know—a thing that I keep thinking about is with all the videos that we’ve seen from Minneapolis, from Chicago, from Los Angeles, of all their brutal activities—it’s like, well, imagine what they’re doing on the airplanes. There’s no cameras, there’s no witness. And when people get deported, it’s harder to contact them and hear what happened to them.
I just think we have a government of sadists right now, and they may have been able to trick enough people into winning the election, obviously, but I think they’re wrong that this many people are sadistic about their neighbors. And yeah, so I don’t know. I’m just trying to do my part by exposing what is happening on these planes.
Sargent: Yeah. Well, I think that you’re getting at a paradox that we should kind of close on—or a tension, maybe. On the one hand, Trump, Stephen Miller, to a lesser extent JD Vance, I think, and then the MAGAverse—they clearly thrill to the cruel and dehumanizing aspects of what ICE is doing. They like that. They think it’s good. They think it appeals to core constituencies out there in the Trump coalition.
But the thing that they haven’t prepared themselves for is that there’s a far larger chunk of people out in the United States that absolutely hates this stuff. And they’ve set in motion this kind of machine of cruelty that can’t be contained anymore, that can’t be reeled back anymore.
They’ve sort of unleashed these kinds of passions, these desires on the part of the MAGA base and these big MAGA media figures to see more of this that can’t be corralled. And it’s kind of careening in a horrifying direction—albeit one that I think hits them with political blowback that could be enough to really win the elections in 2026 and 2028, I hope.
Brockell: Yeah. I saw this incredible post this morning from this man named Tom Cartwright, and he’s a really interesting person. He’s a retired J.P. Morgan executive. And for about six years, he was tracking ICE flights and releasing monthly reports basically by himself, just out of concern for the migrants on board. And like I said, [he] largely did this work alone.
And then last summer, ICE flights increased so much—and he’s a retiree—he trained some people at Human Rights First to, sort of, turn over his project to them. And so now the ICE flight monitor there releases those reports. Well, this morning, Tom posted this photo of training in Springfield, Ohio. He lives in Ohio. He said there’s more than 600 people here to be trained on how to protect their Haitian neighbors. And there’s more people coming in. And it was just a packed room of a bunch of what looks like white retirees there to be trained on how to protect their neighbors.
And I was just thinking how long Tom has done this work—trying to witness the cruelty being inflicted on immigrants by himself. And I hope that he was heartened to see all of his neighbors now engaged in the same work.
Sargent: That’s a beautiful place to end. You know, there really is a lot of absolute horror out there out in the country at what we’re seeing. On some level, we’ve got to be heartened by that.
Brockell: I just don’t think there are that many people who are that sadistic. And I hope that one of the things that we can take away from this dark period that we’re going through is a renewed love of our real-life neighbors.
Sargent: I agree 100%. Gillian Brockell, thanks so much for coming on with us. It was great to talk to you.
Brockell: Nice to talk to you too.