The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 29 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.
Markwayne Mullin, the new Homeland Security secretary, leveled a really strange threat at blue states this week. He suggested that DHS might block international flights going into so-called sanctuary cities, which have protections for immigrants that Donald Trump hates. This is a really dark turn in a longer saga involving a battle over an ICE facility in New Jersey, which we’re going to get into.
But first, just note how incredibly absurd this threat is. It would probably do serious damage to the economy and deal another big blow to GOP chances in the midterms.
The whole situation captures some of the ugliest aspects of this presidency. So we’re trying to make sense of it all with Nayna Gupta, the policy director for the American Immigration Council, which follows DHS closely. Naina, thanks for coming on.
Nayna Gupta: Thanks, Greg, for having me.
Sargent: So in Newark, New Jersey, at a federal immigration center called Delaney Hall, activists have been protesting outside due to complaints from inmates of terrible conditions inside.
New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill just put out a statement saying that state health inspectors were just denied full access to the facility. She’s calling for it to be shut down. There have been scuffles with lawmakers getting pepper-sprayed. Naina, can you just quickly recap what’s happening there?
Gupta: Sure. So there are around 300 people in immigration detention at Delaney Hall, this facility in New Jersey, and they have been staging hunger and labor strikes to protest inhumane conditions in the facility for days now. And that sparked protests outside of the facility by family members of those who are locked up inside, who are being fed rotten food, receiving subpar medical care. And those protests have grown over the past several days.
That has attracted the attention and participation of high-ranking elected officials like both New Jersey senators, the governor of New Jersey, who are trying to get into this facility to respond to this growing crisis. And that has triggered a fairly violent reaction from ICE and federal agents that are on the ground there near Delaney Hall.
Sargent: Well, it’s in this context that DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin made his preposterous threat. In essence, what he said is if things like this Delaney Hall fight keep happening, he’s going to have to transfer Customs and Border Protection officers out of airports to go protect these federal facilities. Let’s listen to Mullin for a second.
Markwayne Mullin (voiceover): When we have situations what’s happening in New Jersey right now, where we have to prioritize where we put federal employees because local law enforcement won’t help protect their streets—not federal streets, city streets—and keep them from barricading and causing harm to our employees, then we have to decide where we’re going to prioritize our federal employees. So we’re not going to halt the flights. What we’re saying is we just won’t be able to process them because we don’t have officers there. We’re going to pull out our Customs and Border Patrol officers that process these flights and put them in these facilities to help protect our employees coming out of work. And if they’re not there to process international flights, then those individuals, when the airlines land—well, they won’t be permitted into the United States.
Sargent: The Fox News headline on all this read as follows: “Mullin threatens to pull CBP from sanctuary city airports.” What do you make of that, Nayna?
Gupta: Look, I mean, this is the Trump administration, now with Mullin at the helm of DHS, once again threatening vindictive actions because they don’t like growing public pushback on their policies. And it’s really important to note that if the administration actually pulled off this outrageous threat of diverting flights out of entire major metropolitan areas, this wouldn’t be about just hurting those cities or immigrants. It would be hurting very many Americans.
This would be hugely disruptive to critical industries, to travelers who travel through these airports, at a moment when the economy is already facing strain and we know that voters are feeling very poorly about this administration’s economic policies.
We don’t know still how real this threat is. We’ve seen the administration make sweeping threats and then walk those back when they face backlash or because they can’t actually effectuate those threats.
But the fact that he’s even on national news networks talking about this underscores their disregard for Americans generally and their willingness again to be vindictive about policies that are totally within the rights of states and local governments.
Sargent: And it’s interesting that he’s saying a lot of this stuff on Fox News because Fox really likes the idea a lot and is really playing it up. I want to play what a Fox News anchor said about this idea. Listen to this.
Fox News anchor (voiceover): Pulling CBP out of airports in sanctuary jurisdictions obviously would have an enormous ripple effect across the country. That’s because it would effectively be the end of international travel into big airports like LAX, San Francisco, Boston Logan, JFK, Newark, Chicago, Philly, Seattle, many others. No customs agents means you can’t process international travelers or cargo, even Americans coming back from overseas. But DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin says the idea is actively being considered.
Sargent: Now, as you said, it’s a little unclear whether Mullin has any real intention of acting on this, but it would really be an extraordinarily dramatic step. As you said, the economic effect would be really, really vast and there would be chaos throughout the travel industry and through many other industries. Can you talk a little bit about that?
I mean, even Fox News seems to be kind of acknowledging here that this is an incredibly draconian scheme. Yet at the same time, Fox can’t help but get kind of excited about it because it’s like, you’re going after sanctuary cities, great, we love it.
Gupta: Right. So let’s be clear about exactly how disruptive and draconian this is. Airlines cannot simply divert flights. There are landing slot limits, which means other airports couldn’t take the volume.
People wouldn’t necessarily be flying into the specific city they enter the U.S. and maybe transiting elsewhere. And so in reality, we can imagine mass flight cancellations, huge disruption at airports, long lines, people being stuck and stranded in cities where they have nowhere to go.
And again, this is just another example of a policy that they are packaging—with Fox News’ help—as cracking down on immigration, which in reality would hurt all Americans and does absolutely nothing to credibly enforce our immigration laws.
And look, Fox News liking the shock and awe of this—this is part of the marketing angle of this administration’s mass deportation agenda. They love the political theater. They love diverting Americans’ attention from the fact that they have done nothing to meaningfully enforce immigration laws in a credible or humane way and instead are just constantly creating these kinds of distractions that feed the media market that Fox News dominates.
Sargent: Right, it’s the Fox News presidency in action. I think to your point, it wouldn’t even matter if they didn’t intend for this to be serious. It wouldn’t even matter if they intended it only as theater, because it’s really pretty terrible that Markwayne Mullin knows—even if he’s just performing—that performing this show for the audience of one is going to be thrilling to him, right?
Mullin, just like everyone else who works for the ailing despot, knows that this sort of “fight” will excite him greatly. Mullin thinks, OK, if I threaten blue states and sanctuary areas, the boss will love it.
This is really one of the most vile features of Trump governance—this constant threat of unleashing government power on Democratic areas, serious or not, just to thrill MAGA America with the prospect of Trump’s government inflicting suffering on blue America. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Gupta: Yeah. I mean, look, this is Mullin using so-called sanctuary cities and policies as a pretext for targeting and dividing communities in America. That’s what this is. And to your point, it’s also about sucking up to the boss, flexing for the boss to show, hey, I’m down with the cruelty that you’re using when it comes to your immigration agenda.
And I’ll just say it—this administration now has repeatedly taken steps to threaten jurisdictions that won’t work with them or to force them to work with the federal government, when the reality is that state and local governments are entitled under the United States Constitution to make decisions that are best for their own interests and their own communities when it comes to law enforcement and public safety.
And there are a growing number of law enforcement voices that will echo that. The Tenth Amendment is clear. The federal government cannot coerce or threaten states and localities into working with ICE. And the federal courts have repeatedly agreed with that. And that just underscores the pretext that Mullin is using here to be able to just flex and show some kind of cruelty and power, both for his boss and their political base.
Sargent: Right. It is all about saying to the boss, look, I’m prepared to use government power to inflict suffering and chaos on blue America. And we shouldn’t let the sheer idiocy of it escape us either. If you were to stop flights into places like Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles—you know who would get hurt? Republican midterm candidates would. You have a lot of crucial House races in Pennsylvania, New York, California.
So basically, Mullin is threatening to further tank Trump’s economy and further wreck GOP midterm chances. Other than that, it’s a great plan, right?
Gupta: I mean, it does seem like they have no regard or care for what kind of backlash there would be when thousands of Americans are waiting hours and hours in airports around the country. This is, again, just Trump’s performative stunts that actually undermine safety, stability, and security and have literally nothing to do with actually enforcing immigration laws. And apparently they don’t care about the political consequences of that. It’s hard then to not come to the conclusion that this is really just cruelty and harm for cruelty’s sake.
Sargent: It really is that. Your group, the American Immigration Council, had a report that one of its features was to go into the need for more cooperation between the states and the federal government, not less. Can you talk a little bit about that? The Trump approach is to essentially make the federal government fundamentally an antagonist of blue states when it comes to immigration enforcement.
We’ve seen it on many other fronts. There are these threats we’re seeing here. There’s the constant threats and bullying towards sanctuary jurisdictions, which you mentioned earlier. Then of course there’s the sending in of armed troops and paramilitary forces into places where the locals and local government don’t want them. You’re advocating for something very different in your report, right?
Gupta: Right. So the framework that we released, “Restoring Credibility and Humanity to Immigration Enforcement,” gives elected officials a vision forward. We know increasingly Americans don’t want mass deportation given the kinds of harms we’ve talked about today, but we haven’t really heard elected officials talk about what this could look like instead.
And what we offer when it comes to how the federal government works with states is we say, it can’t be this—that this collaboration happens through threats. It also can’t be that the federal government asks the states to enforce an agenda that actually hurts their communities, that makes people less likely to report crime or less likely to trust their local police officers.
And so instead, the federal government should not only work with states on enforcement, they should also give funding to support states that have large immigrant populations so that they’re working towards safety beyond just cracking down on people who might pose some kind of public safety threat.
And a model like that, that’s not enforcement-only but that’s also supportive, is the only way to rebuild trust that has been absolutely decimated in cities and states like Illinois or California or Massachusetts or even North Carolina, where going forward, states are really nervous to work with the federal government. And to rebuild that trust, the federal government has to step in and start offering support for immigrant communities. And when you do that, you actually create safer, stronger communities. And we offer a vision for what that can look like.
Sargent: Yes. And we’re seeing Democratic governors step up right now. People like Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill here in New Jersey that we just discussed. They’re starting to really articulate a vision of state and federal cooperation from the state side, which is really great to see, I think. It’s going to be a big feature of the Democratic agenda going forward, is my guess.
Just to close this out, the threat from Mullin—whatever happens with that—what do you see happening at this ICE facility? It looks like the situation has deteriorated pretty badly.
As I mentioned at the top of this, Mikie Sherrill, the New Jersey governor, just put out a statement saying that state health inspectors were denied full access to the facility. She’s calling for it to be shut down. What’s going to happen here? Is it going to be shut down? Is the state going to get access? Are we going to learn more? What do you anticipate?
Gupta: I mean, I think it’s hard to know where the road ends on this. What we’ve seen is that when protesters and leaders dig in and push back and make demands for releases and better care, a lot of the time the Trump administration doubles down and punishes with policies like the one Mullin is threatening now.
I think the question is, can some of these political leaders—like the New Jersey senators, like the New Jersey governor—cut some deal with the Trump administration where they say, you can’t just keep people inside in these conditions, you can’t let the situation outside deteriorate? What can we do to get in better food so people aren’t starving? What can we do to make sure they’re receiving appropriate medical care? Are there at least some vulnerable folks that we can release and get out?
And we hope that this public pressure and the growing public outcry will lead to the kinds of headlines that the Trump administration has been avoiding since what happened in Minnesota. And if that happens, that might be just enough leverage to get them to compromise to some degree, so that people—especially inside, and families outside—are not harmed as extensively as we are seeing right now.
Sargent: That just brings up something in my mind, what you said there about the need for this kind of cooperation. The Trump administration and Donald Trump and the more fascist advisors around him like Stephen Miller—they think this kind of conflict is good.
You mentioned that in Minnesota, the Trump administration actually ended up pulling back, which is true. The public backlash was ferocious, both in Minneapolis but also nationally. They really nosedived in the polls throughout that whole thing. The horrible killing of Americans in Minneapolis was the real precipitator for that.
But there were voices inside the Trump administration that understood that this kind of searing civil conflict is bad for Trump and Republicans politically. On the flip side, you’ve got people like Stephen Miller and Markwayne Mullin who think it’s good for them politically to have these kinds of conflicts.
I don’t really know what to make of that other than it’s just sort of a struggle between the two camps at all times. And it’s not really clear to me who is dominant. It sort of depends on the day, but right now it looks like the Stephen Miller–Markwayne Mullin nitwit school of politics is really winning out.
Gupta: What we are seeing is this constant back and forth, but that at the end of the day seems to be Stephen Miller, the architect and mind behind all of these extreme and cruel policies, winning the day. We’ve at moments even seen the president walk back some of the most extreme immigration policies they’ve had. And a few days later, the administration nevertheless doubles down.
I think they felt the public backlash to the events in Minnesota, which underscores for Americans that pushback matters even when you have an administration with authoritarian tendencies. But it doesn’t change that they’re still in power and that Stephen Miller can still drive the ship of policy here. And that means at any moment we can quickly nosedive, as you say, back into a very extreme set of policies.
And the only other point I’ll add, Greg, is that even when what they’re doing doesn’t make headlines—because it’s not so obviously cruel and violent as what we’ve seen in Minnesota and now at Delaney Hall—they’re simultaneously effectuating policies that are more quiet but are nevertheless destructive to our entire legal immigration system, to U.S. citizen spouses and families of immigrants.
They have a toolkit of tactics and policies that they’re using. And when they lean in on the more visibly cruel ones, we do tend to see greater public pushback. I think that will likely continue, and we’ll have to see how that ends up playing out over the next several months before midterms. And then especially after, where they may feel no guardrails at all.
Sargent: A hundred percent. I think that the more light that’s shined on this stuff, the better, for precisely that reason. When this stuff is in the news, they nosedive further in the polls. Nayna Gupta, thanks so much for coming on. It was really great to talk to you.
Gupta: Thanks so much, Greg, for having me.