In This Episode
- Check out Garrett’s work – https://tinyurl.com/33p63f8v
- Long Shadow: The Lingering Questions of 9/11 –https://tinyurl.com/32bdmpny
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TRANSCRIPT
Jane Coaston: It’s Monday, July 14th, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day. The show that thinks that President Donald Trump waking up on a Saturday morning and posting that he thinks Rosie O’Donnell should have her citizenship revoked would be kind of an amusing side note if he were not the President of the United States of America who already wants to end birthright citizenship and deport U.S. citizens. [music break] On today’s show, it’s been one year since the attempted assassination of President Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania, and the state department is undergoing a massive reorganization, which really just means laying off more than a thousand employees. But let’s start with immigration, specifically immigration and customs enforcement, or ICE. It’s now the most well-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government, thanks to Trump’s new disastrous spending and tax law. That’s not great for a whole bunch of reasons. We could talk about plans to hire 10,000 new officers as quickly as possible. But first and foremost, let’s talk about what, or more accurately, who ICE has been tasked with detaining and deporting. Because even before it got all this new money, the agency had seemingly pivoted away from targeting all those terrifying criminals Trump promised to deport on the campaign trail. Now, the agency is more regularly going after non-criminals, your farm workers, day laborers, and folks who have been here for decades. And ICE data backs up that pivot. Of the nearly 58,000 people being held by the agency, more than 70% don’t have criminal convictions. As they’re sweeping all these people up, they’re also building new facilities to house them, like Alligator Alcatraz in Florida. The fact that the administration is excited about that name tells you everything you need to know about where its head is at. Now, don’t worry. Border Czar Tom Homan explained to Fox News on Friday that immigration authorities use all of the evidence at their disposal to determine who should be taken during raids and definitely don’t resort to, say, racial profiling. Oh wait, that’s not what he said.
[clip of Tom Homan] Look, people need to understand, ICE officers and border patrol, they don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them. They just need this to tally the circumstances, right? They just got through the observation, you know, get articulable facts based on the location, the occupation, their physical appearance, their actions.
Jane Coaston: Huh? Homan tried to walk back those comments during an interview with CNN on Sunday, saying, quote, “physical description can’t be the sole reason to detain and question somebody.” But as California Democratic Senator Alex Padilla pointed out during a conversation with the network’s Dana Bash, that’s exactly what’s happening. People are getting detained by immigration authorities because of their physical appearance.
[clip of Senator Alex Padilla] Dana, what if I was outside of Home Depot, because I like to do some work around the house, not dressed in a suit. Would I be a target of ICE enforcement under Tom Homan? Probably.
Jane Coaston: And now we’re giving ICE and other immigration enforcement agencies close to $200 billion to hire thousands more officers and build more detention facilities to do more of all this. Fantastic. So to talk about all the potential problems that come with ballooning ICE’s budget so quickly, I spoke with Garrett Graff. He’s a historian and longtime politics and national security reporter. Graff currently writes the Doomsday Scenario newsletter and hosts the award-winning history podcast, Long Shadow. Garrett, welcome to What a Day.
Garrett Graff: Thanks so much for having me.
Jane Coaston: So Trump’s new tax and spending law throws nearly $200 billion at pretty much every aspect of Trump’s draconian immigration crackdown. Can you start by putting into context how big of a funding increase this is for immigration and customs enforcement and for customs and border protection? How are those agencies about to change?
Garrett Graff: Yeah. So you could probably say that this is the largest funding increase for federal law enforcement that we have ever seen in modern history. That money is split between a bunch of different buckets to hire new ICE detention officers, hire new CBP officers, build new detention facilities. But altogether, what this means is that ICE will be the best funded, highest funded federal law enforcement agency in the United States. Um. It will have a budget, um you know, sort of on the order of the US Marine Corps.
Jane Coaston: In a recent newsletter, you wrote that by doing this, we are potentially, quote, “turbocharging an increasingly lawless regime of immigration enforcement.” Can you explain that?
Garrett Graff: Yeah, so some of this has to do with the weirdness of how we treat border security and immigration security in the United States, which is uh CBP and ICE operate under a slightly different set of standards. Um. They don’t operate in conjunction with a sort of normal Article 3 court’s standards of evidence that you would expect the FBI, the DEA, the Secret Service, the Marshalls to have to uphold. They have sort of different levels of evidence that they need to initiate contacts. Um. And basically, they’re just also not as well trained. And I think one of the things that really worries me about this moment is ICE already has some of the lowest hiring standards, lowest educational standards, and lowest training standards of any federal law enforcement agency. And there’s simply no way for a healthy law enforcement agency to grow at the rate and size and scale that ICE is expected to grow under this new hiring bill. Um. And when we did this with the Border Patrol after 9/11, um I spent about five years reporting on the surge of criminality and corruption inside the Border Patrol that followed that hiring surge. And it was a disaster. Um. There was one CBP officer or agent arrested for misconduct or corruption every single day from 2008 to 2014. Um. And even by 2017, the pace of arrests for misconduct or corruption had slowed to only one agent or officer every 36 hours. I mean, this was an incredible wave of corruption because they lowered their hiring standards. They lowered their training standards and they put a lot of agents and officers into the field who never ever should have been federal law enforcement.
Jane Coaston: Okay, that gets to the next question I have, which is actually what is concerning me about everything you are saying. In this current moment, who are the kinds of people who would most likely apply to be an ICE agent?
Garrett Graff: Yeah, this is where I actually get most worried, which is the people who are going to be attracted to being an ICE officer right now are almost by definition the people that we should not want to be ICE officers. That we have never seen in federal law enforcement a hiring surge take place amid an agency that is so polarized and so politicized as ICE is right now. The appeal that ICE has is for effectively, I think the worst bullies in American society, which is um you know, do you want to dress up like you are attacking Fallujah to go rough up some guys in the Home Depot parking lot? You know? Are you interested in being part of a SWAT team that’s taking down grandmas and manhandling members of Congress outside detention facilities in the United States? Like, if that’s you, then ICE is for you. And that’s like, that’s a terrible. hiring pitch for the types of people who are going to be applying to be this next 10,000 new ICE officers.
Jane Coaston: Are there even thousands of people in the country who want to do these jobs? They may talk like they want these jobs, but there was a recent piece in the Atlantic citing a few current ICE agents, mostly anonymously, and they paint a picture of a miserable workforce of people who don’t want to be rounding up farm workers and day laborers at Home Depot or grandmas. They don’t want to be doing any of this, but those are current ICE agents, not the people being recruited who are saying hell yeah, let’s do this. But are there that many people who want to do that? I am horrified of the answer in either direction.
Garrett Graff: Yeah. And I think the answer is probably yes, um which is there are 10,000 people across the country who are watching these headlines go by, watching these raids happen, and are excited by it. One of my concerns in this is how we are tipping the balance of federal law enforcement, away from the agencies within the Department of Justice, the FBI, the ATF, the DEA, the US Marshalls, and toward the Department Of Homeland Security, where you have CBP, already the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country, um and now ICE, which is on track to probably actually even be larger than CBP and DHS law enforcement is just less grounded in the Constitution. It is less grounded in civil rights and civil liberties in the way that we expect in a free society. Border security and sort of border security zones just have different levels of civil rights standards than we are used to in the Department of Justice.
Jane Coaston: Here’s what gets me. We’re ballooning immigration enforcement’s budget. We are building all these new detention centers. But notably, the new law doesn’t include very much money to hire more immigration judges to hear all these new cases, despite a massive backlog. In fact, the law actually caps the number of new immigration judges at 800. This weekend we saw reporting about a new ICE memo telling officers they can deport migrants to countries other than their own, with as little as 6 hours notice. What do you think this will all add up to in a year, even a few months from now?
Garrett Graff: Yeah, and again, this is where I think we have to be able to read between the lines about just how lawless and cruel this regime is going to be that we are setting up and funding right now as a country, which is um, you know, we poured $200 billion into immigration enforcement in this new bill. There was obviously plenty of money to throw around at this problem, according to the Trump Administration. They only took the number of immigration judges in the country. And mind you, this is a system that is already working with like a years long backlog, um from 700 immigration judges to 800. So a tiny fractional increase, even as they double the number of ICE officers, increase the number of CBP officers. So you’re going to be throwing a lot more people into an already backlogged and broken system, which makes clear, I think to me, that their plan is to not respect any of the due process and civil liberties that we are used to in our immigration system, and that they are just going to be you know throwing bodies in unmarked vans, getting them to planes and getting them overseas to whatever country they’re willing to accept. You know, America’s enforced disappearances, which is the term of art in international law that I think we need to get ourselves comfortable with because these are not going to be detentions and removals like any system that we are used to. This is going to sort of kidnapping and enforced disappearrences akin to, you know I think some of the worst authoritarian regimes of modern history.
Jane Coaston: [sigh] Garrett, thank you so much for joining me.
Garrett Graff: I would say it’s always a pleasure, but this wasn’t actually.
Jane Coaston: No, no it wasn’t. That’s okay. That was my conversation with historian and journalist, Garrett Graff. We’ll link to his newsletter and podcast in our show notes. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube so you can see my existential horror in real time, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]
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Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today.
[sung] Headlines.
[clip of President Donald Trump] We’ve been taken advantage of for many, many years by countries, both friend and foe. And frankly, the friends have been worse than the foes in many cases. So I would say just keep working. It’s all going to work out.
Jane Coaston: President Trump explained American tariff policy as he sees it to reporters on Friday, just hours before he threatened Mexico and the European Union with a 30% import duty starting on August 1st. Trump’s declaration came via two separate letters posted to Truth Social on Saturday, one addressed to Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum and the other to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. On Sunday, von der Leyen told reporters she’s ready to play ball with the U.S.
[clip of Ursula von der Leyen] We have always been very clear that we prefer a negotiated solution. This remains the case and we will use the time that we have now till the 1st of August. And on the second track, since the very beginning, we have worked and now are ready to respond with countermeasures.
Jane Coaston: Scheinbaum said Saturday that she, too, was confident that Mexico would reach a deal with the U.S. by August 1st. The threats against Mexico and the EU were the president’s final flourish on a week-long tariff terror. Trump announced new tariffs for 23 other countries this week, including Japan, South Korea, Canada, and Brazil. At the time of our taping on Sunday evening, Trump had yet to taco. To Mexico, the EU, Japan, South Korea and Canada and Brazil, I say this. Don’t worry, I’m sure that’s coming next week. Sunday marked one year since the assassination attempt against President Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. A local firefighter, Cory Comperatore, was killed by one of the shots fired at the stage. His widow, Helen, appeared on Fox & Friends Saturday to discuss the recent suspension of Secret Service Officers on duty then.
[clip of Helen Comperatore] Suspending them when my husband was killed. You know that’s not punishment. No.
Jane Coaston: Six Secret Service agents working at the event were suspended without pay or benefits for periods of up to six weeks, the agency said in a statement last week. The Secret Service came under intense criticism by Congress after the attempt on Trump’s life. Kimberly A. Cheadle, who led the agency at the time, resigned days later. President Trump offered a more positive take on the Secret Service’s performance during a Saturday appearance on My View with Lara Trump.
[clip of President Donald Trump] I have great confidence in these people. I know the people and they’re very talented, very capable. They had a bad day and I think they’ll admit that and a rough day. This is a very dangerous job being president.
Jane Coaston: As everyone knows, only the most amazing and ethical journalism comes from an interview between the president and his daughter-in-law on Fox News. Moving on. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is pushing back on reports criticizing the federal government’s response, and hers specifically, to the deadly floods in Texas. Noem sat down with NBC News’ Meet the Press for an interview that aired Sunday. In it, the secretary defended a rule she implemented that reportedly requires her to approve federal emergency management agency expenses over $100,000. Naturally, the rule has garnered backlash and blame for a slower deployment of some resources to Texas after the floods earlier this month. Noem refuted those claims.
[clip of Kristi Noem] The $100,000 sign-off is for every contract that goes through the Department of Homeland Security. That’s–
[clip of Kristen Welker] So you did implement that policy.
[clip of Kristi Noem] It’s an accountability on contracts that go forward, but there was no break in contracts. Those contracts were approved as soon as they were in front of me, and FEMA knew they were fully to deploy the instant that the local officials asked for their request.
Jane Coaston: Hmm. So much for accountability. And when host Kristen Welker pressed Noem, she responded with some of MAGA’s favorite buzzwords.
[clip of Kristen Welker] The New York Times is reporting that thousands of calls from flood victims to FEMA call centers went unanswered in the middle of this ongoing disaster because you didn’t renew contracts to keep call center staff in place until nearly one week after the floods. Why did it take so long to extend those?
[clip of Kristi Noem] It’s just false. Those contracts were in place. Nobody–
[clip of Kristen Welker] It didn’t take five days?
[clip of Kristi Noem] No employees were off of work. Every one of them was answering calls. So false reporting, fake news, and it’s discouraging.
Jane Coaston: According to that New York Times report, FEMA didn’t answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line two days after the flood swept through central Texas. Search operations for the roughly 170 people still believed to be missing are ongoing. Some were paused on Sunday as more heavy rain pounded the region.
[clip of former under Secretary of State] My reaction is one of shock, disbelief, and sadness for individuals who literally dedicated their lives to keeping Americans safe, to supporting American prosperity, and for advancing American values.
Jane Coaston: A former under Secretary of State, [?], spoke to the Associated Press about the 1,300 State Department employees who were laid off on Friday. A combination of civil servants and foreign service officers received layoff notices just one day after they had been officially notified of the upcoming action. The layoffs are part of a massive reorganization currently underway at the State Department. The plan, approved by Secretary of state Marco Rubio, calls for an 18% reduction in U.S.-based staff. According to a memo to Congress, the changes at the State Department are driven by a need to eliminate redundancies, integrate what remains of USAID, and to better serve President Trump’s America First vision of foreign diplomacy. Sure. The United States Supreme Court paved the way for the layoffs at the State Department with its decision Tuesday that the Trump administration can move ahead with its plans to dramatically downsize the federal workforce. That decision could also result in mass firings at other federal agencies, like the departments of the Treasury and Housing and Urban Development. And that’s the news. [music break]
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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, thank the maker that our president has so many brilliant ideas to prevent deaths from flash floods, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how President Trump came up with another amazing concept during his definitely not sycophantic interview with his daughter-in-law, Lara, on Fox News Saturday evening.
[clip of President Donald Trump] Maybe they should have had bells or something go off. But it’s pretty dangerous territory when you think of all the times that they’ve had this.
Jane Coaston: Like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and bells? Why didn’t anyone think about bells before? [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Emily Fohr. Our producer is Michell Eloy. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Sean Ali, Tyler Hill, and Laura Newcomb. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]
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