Aaron Reichland Melnick (1:41)

Thanks for having me again.

Bill Kristol (1:43)

So I thought today we would try to update people on what is going on. We've seen headlines obviously there's the kind of internal enforcement side of things, the ice, Border Patrol stuff, a lot of visibility. Maybe we'll start with that. And then I want to talk a little more than people normally do about what the administration is also doing and revoking tps, temporary protected status and other things. And let's call it the legal side as opposed to internal enforcement, the kicking people out or restricting people from coming in side of immigration. And then maybe we can talk more broadly about the bigger picture almost of where they're going with this, with their immigration or anti immigration policy. But so tell me. I mean we've seen the videos from Chicago and All what. What's go. What's going on? Is it more aggressive than you expected? Is it subsiding, or is it going to continue, etc.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (2:33)

Yeah. The long story short is that across pretty much every sector, Trump's crackdown on immigration is accelerating in the ICE enforcement, DHS enforcement in the interior side of things. While the Operation Midway blitz has formally concluded, and there are debates over whether, as Operation Charlotte's Web in Charlotte, North Carolina, has concluded, the pace of immigration enforcement is significantly up and continues to be up. And a lot of this is due in part to the fact that the Trump administration is getting the funds online that they got at the start of July in Trump's One big beautiful bill act. $75 billion for internal enforcement, that's 45 billion for detention, and 30 billion for other parts of the interior enforcement system, such as hiring. And they have new staff coming online every day, new detention beds coming online on every day. And so we are really not seeing anything slow down, even if individual operations in individual cities may have dialed back a smidge.

Bill Kristol (3:39)

That's really. I mean, I think it's the point. You made that point extremely clearly and well, because it's so important. I have the sense that among a lot of people who don't approve of what Trump's doing, there's kind of a sense of, well, maybe we're past the worst of it. It might die down a bit. But I guess, I mean, analytically, there's no necessary reason for that to happen, right?

Aaron Reichland Melnick (3:57)

No. And the data doesn't show it either. Arrests are rising every single month. There has been no slowdown. Detention is rising every single month. There has been no slowdown there. In fact, the tension system is now supposedly around 70,000 beds. When Trump took office, there are about 40,000 detention beds around the country. So now the system has increased in size by about 75% on its way to doubling in size probably by the year end. And, of course, who is being sent to detention is increasingly people without criminal records. If you look at, if you break down the statistics that are available to us, which is whether people have any prior conviction whatsoever. And prior conviction here, I want to really emphasize, does not mean all murderers, rapists, etc. Prior conviction includes things like misdemeanor illegal entry. It includes things like traffic violations, driving with a suspended license. You know, things that are small, nonviolent offenses, everything from that to much more serious offenses. So the percent of, you know, the number of people arrested and held in ICE detention with serious criminal records is increasing by about like 30, 40%. The number of people with pending criminal charges has about doubled. And the number of people in detention with no criminal record whatsoever, no pending charges, no criminal, criminal convictions, no matter how minor, has increased by a thousand percent since Trump took office. It is now the single largest group of people held in detention. 40%, 41%. And that number is rising every two weeks when the Trump administration releases data, which we finally have now that the shutdown is over.

Bill Kristol (5:37)

So just to be clear, so 40%, 2/5 of those in detention have no criminal record. And another pretty good chunk of that other 60% have very minimal, let's say, yeah, criminal records.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (5:49)

David Beer at the Cato Institute got hold of documents that ICE produced to Congress breaking down the actual conviction record of those who have prior criminal convictions. And what it showed is only about 5% of the people who had some sort of criminal conviction had a violent offense. There is an additional 10% or so who also have some serious offenses. That can include drug offenses, it can include other things which are more serious. But we are not talking about the majority of people having serious criminal convictions. The majority of people held who have some prior interaction with the criminal justice system. It is usually low level offenses, misdemeanors or violations.

Bill Kristol (6:29)

And if Trump and his people, Steve Miller, I suppose, in particular, want to, are serious about just getting rid of everyone in the country or as many people as possible who are in the country who are undocumented, the pool of people they can keep going after is large. Am I right? I mean, how many, what's the absolute number of how many have been deported or rounded up? Do we know? Or. And what's the number of sort of potential people they can keep going after?

Aaron Reichland Melnick (6:53)

Yeah, well, of course, you know, this is something where the Trump administration loves to throw around crazy high numbers. JD Vance says throws around completely invented numbers like 20 million, 30 million people. It is crazy. Every month, the number of people in the country who are undocumented seemingly raises by another 10 million. Now I see people saying 40 million. And now I've seen people start saying, well, it can't even be 40, it's got to be 50 million. So that that number keeps going up and up and up. But when you actually look at this, seriously, you look at the census data, you do economic studies on this, the undocumented population is about 14 to 15 million. And you will get consensus on those opinions from pretty much everyone on the center, center left, center right, the center right. The further right you go, the higher the estimates get. But Even fair, the foundation for Americans for Immigration Reform, which is one of the more extreme groups out there, even their estimate is 18 million, which I think is incorrect, but that gives you some sense when you compare it to these 30, 40, 50 million numbers that even one of the most anti immigrant restrictionist groups out there isn't even saying that those numbers are right. So that population, how many people of the Trump administration actually rounded up and deported? We're looking at so far somewhere around 300,000. Now, the Trump administration says they've deported over half a million people. They are putting out numbers claiming they've hit a half a million deportations and 2 million people have left. Do not believe those numbers. The half million figure is based on real numbers, but they've just distorted it and, you know, characterizing things that are not deportations as deportations. So when we actually look at the hard data that is provided by the government to the public, the limited amount that we have, we are looking at probably around 300,000. In so far since he took office.

Bill Kristol (8:44)

And self deportation, do we have much data on how many people are deciding to leave the country in advance of getting picked up?

Aaron Reichland Melnick (8:51)

Yeah. So the Trump administration says around 25 to 35,000 people have used the CBP home process. That is the system where people can essentially self report to the government and get $1,000 once they return to their home country. About 35,000, 25, 35,000 people have used that. An unknown number of other people who have been locked in detention have taken what's known as assisted voluntary return, which is a similar thing, but there it's far more coercive. It's people in a detention center being handed a piece of paper and told either you sign this and you get to go home tomorrow, or we're going to keep you locked up here for nine months while you fight your case. And a lot of people have never been in jail before, They've never been detained, they're in a prison jumpsuit, they're away from their family, their friends, and they say, I can't take this, and they just sign the paper. So those numbers are probably much higher. And then the Trump administration throws around this 1.6 million figure where they say 1.6 million people left the country without being deported, self deported. And that's based on a figure that produced by the center for Immigration Studies, a anti immigrant restrictionist group more on the center right than the far right. And I would say that estimate has a number of asterisks over it. And the most crucial One being it comes from a data source that economists have said is not actually valuable for getting direct population level numbers. So we are waiting. I think this is a little frustrating an answer. The most responsible thing to do to figure out this question of how many people have left without being deported is to wait a year or two for the census to produce new data. And once we have that census data, we'll be able to get a reliable estimate. Until now, all the previous, all the estimates that can be produced come with huge asterisks on them.

Bill Kristol (10:37)

But I suppose the implication of this is if they wanted to, I mean, I guess everyone, some people have assumed, even I sometimes say, well, this thing at some point subsides. They're not going to spend four years plowing through every major American city. But there are plenty of people for them to, to continue to go after.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (10:52)

Yes.

Bill Kristol (10:53)

I mean, right there. Not. It's not like they're using up the. They won't. Now they could choose politically to quote, declare success a year from now and say we've deported X million and another X million of self deported and we're kind of subsiding. But they don't have to do that.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (11:07)

If they don't wish to know. And I mean, realistically, even if they double the numbers they're hitting now, even if, let's say they managed to hit their 1 million deportations a year figure, which I said for a while, I don't think they're going to hit this. You know, they may be on track by next year to hit half a million in a single year. So they would have to double on top of that. But let's say that they do hit half a million and you know, then we're still talking about 27, 25 plus years, 28 years to hit 14 million. You know, say they hit a million in a year. That's still over a decade. And that's even. We're still talking about probably a decade or more of this level of enforcement or higher. If they actually wanted to deport everybody.

Bill Kristol (11:50)

Well, I suppose self deportation, deportation would reduce. If they could claim that, incidentally, I'm making this up twice as many people are self deporting as we're deporting. Then they could say they could do this, make even much, much more progress in four years.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (12:03)

Only eight to 10 years.

Bill Kristol (12:05)

Yeah. Either way, it's a big project.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (12:07)

It's a big project. And you know, I think this is really crucial for people to understand why no government has ever tried to do that before. We are talking about four to four and a half percent of the United States population. Nearly one in every 25 people in the country in some locations, one in 10 people in the country. In Los Angeles, it's either one in 10 or one in 12 somewhere around that. You are talking about trying to kick out huge parts of the country, entire neighborhoods worth of people. And that if you want to do that, and the Trump administration does want to do that, you are talking about transforming the country into far more of a police state. You are talking about transforming the relationship United States citizens have with their law enforcement communities. Because, of course, it's not like undocumented immigrants are sort of ghosts who flit amongst the population unseen and, you know, and interacting with them. No, they're customers at businesses, their family members, their friends, their parishioners at churches, their students in schools. And so, you know, even in a classroom, you know, you have a. Maybe a child who's been here for 10 years undocumented, they're a senior at high school, maybe they're the prom queen in. They get deported. That's every person in the school who knew that person who's impacted. So the ripple effects of this are far more broad than just 4% of the population. The ripple effects impact pretty much everybody in some way or another. And as this operation continues over the next few years, it's just going to be more and more visible.

Bill Kristol (13:36)

Yeah. And say nothing of the economic effects. So let's move then to the other side of what they're doing, I suppose, or they're maybe more than one side to this other side. But the most visible things I've seen have been the announcements of removing temporary protected status or letting it expire, I suppose, not extending it. The various groups of immigrants, Haitians, Venezuelans and others. How does that work? What are those numbers? Like, what's. What's going to happen? I mean, there are a ton of these people in the country.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (14:04)

Yeah. So temporary protected status is a form of protection that Congress created 35 years ago that allows now the DHS secretary to say there are extraordinary conditions in someone's home country. There is ongoing armed conflicts, there's a natural disaster, or just conditions are so poor that it would be wrong to deport people back there because you'd be deporting people into harm. And at the time that the Trump administration took office, there were about 1.3 million people who had temporary protected status. Now, about a million of those people got temporary protected status under the Biden administration. Of that million 350,000 Venezuelans were actually protected by the Trump admin, in fact, by Trump himself in his last days in office. So we're talking about, though, the biggest populations here are from Venezuela and Haiti, which takes up most of that million. The rest are much smaller populations, some of them less than a thousand people. You know, it's South Sudan. There are not very many South Sudanese here. But when the country fell into civil war, the Biden administration, I think, correctly said, we're not going to send someone back into the middle of a civil war. That's the whole point of tps. Well, the Trump administration believes inherently that all of these types of statuses that are temporary and administrative discretion are wrong. And they are invoking a provision of the law that says, well, we can refuse to continue granting TPS if we think it's against the national interest. And their national interest argument is we just don't want these people here. And that's really all it boils down to. They're not saying things are better in some situations. They are, in a few of the TPS terminations, they are saying it's better. But realistically, they're just saying, we don't want these people here. And so they've said, Haiti. Haiti is falling into gang warfare. The situation there is dire. We don't care. We just want them out of the country. Same with Venezuela. They're basically saying, we want to go to war with Venezuela. We're firing drones into people alleged to be Venezuelan drug traffickers. But actually Venezuela is totally fine. We can just deport everybody back there. We're ending protection, even for the people that Trump himself personally protected. And so this has really gone under the radar, but it's. A million people have been rendered undocumented de documented. They had legal status, they had protections. Yes, they were temporary protections, but the presumption was they wouldn't lose those protections until conditions improved. But that's not what the Trump admin is saying. They're saying, we don't care if the conditions have improved. We just want to get rid of it anyway. Who cares what happens to you? And so they've actually potentially made more people undocumented so far than they have actually deported. And so what happens that really undermines communities?

Bill Kristol (16:48)

Yeah, yeah, what happens? You're sitting there, you're, you know, John Smith, and you've been working, I take it you can work when you have a tps and you can work, you.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (16:56)

Can even travel, you can leave the.

Bill Kristol (16:57)

Country paying taxes, you're doing whatever. And, and you're. And then you're rendered or have the prospect of being rendered undocumented.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (17:06)

Yeah.

Bill Kristol (17:06)

So you're susceptible then to being removed. Your, your, your employer has a problem continuing to keep you if he's, if he or she's careful about, you know, not hiring undocumented people, et cetera.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (17:18)

Right? Yeah. And for some of these people, they've been here for more than a decade. Haiti was first granted temporary protective status in 20 earthquake 15 years ago. And there's about 50,000 Haitians who have had temporary protected status for 15 years. And these are people now who have been living and working legally in the country for a decade and a half. Every 18 months they have to submit to a new background check to ensure that they are still in compliance with every rule. That means any criminal conviction. And basically you're, heck, you can have a very minor few things, but basically any significant criminal offense beyond like a low level traffic offense will get you to lose tps. So these are essentially the most vetted people in the country. Every 18 months they are vetted by the federal government for 15 years. And the Trump admin is terminating TPS for them. So, you know, that means a lot of them might be small business owners, there'll be managers, there'll be senior employees, people who have been here for a long time. And when the Trump administration, you know, when they terminate it, they've now said they want it to end in February for Haiti. There will be lawsuits over this. Essentially what they're saying is at that day, you know, 12:01am, the next day you're no longer here legally, you no longer have the right to work. You have to leave now for a lot of people, some of them will leave, absolutely. Others may not. They may become undocumented. They don't get picked up or arrested automatically because now they just become one of the 14 million. But also crucially, they may be applying for some other form of benefit. They may end up seeking asylum. They may try to get a green card through some process that one or two people might be available for. But the lion's share will not be available, will not be eligible for anything. They will probably just become undocumented.

Bill Kristol (19:08)

And so that hasn't, I mean, a lot of those announcements have been prospective or coming soon. You're going to lose your tps, right? We haven't really seen, I don't have the sense that we've seen massive effects yet of the, on the TPS side. Am I right about that?

Aaron Reichland Melnick (19:21)

Or we have for Venezuelans. 650,000 Venezuelans have lost their Status. And then the population which had had TPS the longest, there were 50,000 Hondurans who had had TPS since 1998. I think there were probably some fair arguments that Congress should have stepped in and given them a green card because the situation for which they got had probably passed. But nevertheless, you know, we're talking 50,000 people who had been here legally for 25 plus years, 27 years in total, renewing every 18 months for 27 years, paying like an application fee every time, paying their taxes, complying, and now they have nothing. You know, for 25 years, a quarter century they've been here legally and now they're sort of figuring out what to do with their lives. And I'm sure that's disrupting tens of thousands of families, many of them with American citizens, given how long they've been here.

Bill Kristol (20:23)

Yeah, no, I'm sure it is. I mean, the Venezuelans, many of them were in South Florida. I was talking to a friend who lives down there who says he hasn't, he's sort of surprised there hasn't been more uproar and also, so far as he can tell, more attempts to go after these people who are now undocumented. So he has a sense that there have obviously been all kinds of people who've left jobs or have. There's been disruptions and family disruptions, people worried about coming to jobs. I think that they used to come to construction or housekeeping or anyone restaurants. But, but yeah, I mean, I guess that's something that looms ahead, right? Sort of. I mean, yeah, we're thinking about the next year or two or three, as you say, the, these people that some will self deport or leave and some will apply for other things. But you're increasing the number of undocumented people in the country.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (21:07)

Yeah. And again, you know, it is quite possible that today there are more undocumented immigrants than when Trump took office. Not because, I mean again, this defined. Depends on how you define the term undocumented. And there are some definitions of that that include people with TPS and DACA and these, what Migration Policy Institute is called these twilight statuses. But there have been more people moved from a twilight status, people who had some form of legal authorization to work and remain here without facing immediate arrest and detention if they encountered an ICE officer, you know, than have been deported. And the Trump admin has reduced the population of people with some form of legal status and put them into the bucket of the totally undocumented than have actually been deported so far. That would appear to be the case. When you look at the data and.

Bill Kristol (21:56)

On the other aspects of legal immigration, I think one sees the headlines. The only people who are going to get asylum are 7,500 Afrikaners, apparently.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (22:06)

Well, not asylum. Refugee status really too crucial. I mean, you know, this is, I make that point because it's a really crucial distinction because asylum is for people who are already here to apply for asylum. You have to be present physically in the United States. The refugee program is about bringing people in who've already been approved for status abroad. And there Trump has just destroyed the refugee program. 45 years of refugees coming to the United States since 1980. The program first set up under Ronald Reagan brought in hundreds of thousands of people during the Reagan admin, you know, further been used things like bringing Bosnians over here following the wars there, bringing Rohingya Muslims following ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. It's really been a valuable program to the United States. And you know, when it is studied, I think it's really crucial to emphasize because they always say we want people here who will assist. Well, refugees pay far more into the system than any other immigrant group. Refugees are an enormous job creators. They help revitalize communities because they essentially act as a targeted funding source from the federal government. The federal government helps people get on their feet and that can be used. And it only goes to communities usually that need more people, communities that have seen falling population. So refugees help revitalize dying communities. And that's happened over and over across the United States in a lot of measured, proven ways. And that program has effectively just been ended and is now only bringing in South Africans. But inside the country now, Trump at the Trump Admin has used the really horrific shooting, really tragic shooting that's happened in Washington D.C. as an excuse to even further crack down on asylum. Of course they claim the asylum system has been abused and you know, they want to make reforms to it. But the reforms appear to be an effort to just shut it down and deny everybody 100% across the board, maybe a few exceptions here and there. They are really gunning to eliminate asylum as a viable path to ever remaining in the United States.

Bill Kristol (24:10)

And we have data obviously on refugees and on people who've sought and received asylum. And does that data, I mean, I suppose the answer of a Trump person would be, well, you say 40 years. That's exactly what we're objecting to. 45 years of open borders and people flooding in from third world countries and unvetted. And that's the point. That's not A bug. That's a feature. But we have a lot of data on who these people are and how they've behaved in the United States. Right?

Aaron Reichland Melnick (24:36)

Yeah. And certainly if you could say every person who granted asylum was a saint. Granted asylum a saint, or granted refugee status was a saint. Of course not. These are large populations, millions of people, many of them came as children, maybe as adults, then did something wrong. And, you know, no system of vetting is 100% perfect. And it can't be. You know, news stories coming about about the man who committed this heinous act in D.C. have suggested he was suffering some, some severe mental issues, had been deteriorating. Apparently friends and family had considered, you know, bringing in authorities because they worried he was suicidal. You can't know. And someone can be clear and pass every record when they enter 5, 10 years in the past. And then some life changes. There is no pre crime. And I think we have to talk about what are the best systems to find the most obvious public safety threats. And you can't also say, well, you're just going to have to prove that you're not going to do anything in the next 60 years. You know, if you come here as a 20 year old, you need to prove to us that for the next 60 years everything in your life is going to be perfect and you're never going to have any trouble. And that's just to say, prove that you're not a human being. And what the Trump administration is doing with new restrictions, with its travel ban, with new rules that they're implementing in the last couple of weeks, some of which predate this horrible act. The horrible incident is they are trying to impose country specific bans on the immigration system so that if you come from certain countries, they want to make it so that it's virtually impossible for you to get any immigration benefit, even if you are here already, even if you've already been vetted, because they say, well, we can't guarantee vetting from those countries and therefore we shouldn't let anybody in. But of course, again, as we've seen, someone can be the world's most secure person, vetted over and over and over again. And they have a mental break. If someone can be, you know, always, there's always a first incident. You have a European here, you know, so European Europe shares all of its data with the United States. They can have a perfect record, they have not a single blemish on their file. They come here as a 20 year old university student and turns out they've been harboring a secret and, you know, they're a serial killer and nobody ever knew about it. You just cannot. There isn't a world in which you can do that. And so you have to focus your resources on the most obvious public safety threat, do as much vetting as is reasonable. But to say because you are from Afghanistan, you're incompatible with this country is absurd. And it's not what this country stands for. I really emphasize we said 1965, the civil rights era, that we will not judge people based on where they are born, that every person can become an American. I think that is something that we have to stand up for. Is why, you know, what is the strength of America? The strength of America is that we are the strongest assimilation engine in the history of the planet, and we are enormously successful about that. And every culture that has come here over 150 years has assimilated into America, and America has assimilated into a bigger, broader nation of immigrants. And we have to stand for in saying we are a strong nation, we do have a strong culture. And Afghans who come over here, they will Americanize. They always do. Every culture has done also.

Bill Kristol (27:51)

I mean, so just two points then, I guess I totally personally agree with that and I think it's well said. But we also have a lot of data on just how these people have done that is someone could say, well, that's very nice, Aaron, very. Sounds very good. But, you know, here's the data. You know, these people who got refugee, who got asylum or immigrated from this country or this set of countries have a crime rate that's 10 times that of native born Americans. They have an unemployment rate five times that. They're on benefit of public welfare. And so you can say these nice things, but the data cuts against you. But my impression is the data to the degree we have, and I guess we have a fair amount, doesn't support the notion that these people are a terrible burden on the US One way or the other. And then my second point, which is slightly different, but am I right in reading that the Trump administration is not talking about retroactively, sort of unadmitting expelling, I guess, people who were vetted and cleared and who've been living here, you know, without thinking that they were here only temporarily, until last week or something? So two different points.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (28:51)

Yeah. So of course, you know, first on the data, obviously population data varies from certain nationalities to others. Certain nationalities do better, but oftentimes that's really about who the flow is. You know, again, refugees take the longest to become Net fiscally positive because they start out from such a low level and they do get support. You know, the part of the refugee program is you get one year of support getting on your feet and that's enormously helpful. But it still means that, you know, the net fiscal benefit eventually come becomes positive. It just takes a little bit longer because people usually start sometimes with nothing but the clothes on the their back. You know, if you're coming from a refugee camp, you start from nothing. And the great promise of this country is that you can build yourself into something. And then second generation immigrants perform economically better than every other group. They are more likely to go to college, they are more likely to succeed economically. They have the highest positive fiscal benefit for the United States. You know, children of immigrants are more likely to start businesses. Just really, really show that, you know, give people a generation or two.

Bill Kristol (29:54)

So that's all in. I mean, that's children of immigrants. However, they've come second generation. So it's not exactly, that's, that's pretty striking actually. You know, it's not even that they're not too much of a drag, that they're actually ahead, so to speak, of.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (30:07)

Yeah, second generation immigrants are enormously entrepreneurial. And this is something that data has shown for many decades. You know, children of immigrants are more likely to start businesses than native born American citizens who are third generation or further away from that. And it's hard to say why. There's a lot of reasons for it, of course, but some of it is the immigrant striver attitude is, you know, if you come from parents who picked up and moved thousands of miles across the world, you maybe get some of that attitude from your parents of like, you always have to push forward and move forward and come up from that position. And I think that's a really valuable thing. It has helped fuel this country. You know, you look at Fortune 500 companies, an overwhelming number of them were started by immigrants or children of immigrants over the crime.

Bill Kristol (30:51)

I mean, similarly, that there's not a, it's not as if our crime problem is primarily or even in a big way an immigration problem. Am I right about that?

Aaron Reichland Melnick (30:59)

Yeah. And look, statistically, legal immigrants commit fewer crimes than native born American citizens. Across the board, undocumented immigrants commit slightly more crimes than legal immigrants, but still less than native born immigrants. This data has been studied over and over again. And I think that's because people know that their status is precarious. And again, of course there will be bad actors. Nobody is trying to suggest otherwise, but that's why you focus your resources on the bad actors and not engage in really collective punishment. Because as a group, statistically, it is less crime than native born citizens. If you want to lower the crime rate in a city, bring in more immigrants, statistically, that will lower the crime rate. Now, of course, as the population goes up, the net number of crimes will increase.

Bill Kristol (31:47)

Such an important point.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (31:48)

It's a hard thing. That's why statistics are complicated.

Bill Kristol (31:52)

No, but I mean, it's striking that in New York, which is famously the crime rate has gone down over 20 years and due to policing or due to whatever. But it has quite a lot from when I was there and immigration in New York, number of immigrants in New York is quite large. Obviously there's been a hub for immigrants. So that would just be a common sense confirmation of what you're saying. Say a word about the, the retroactive thing that Trump is ordering or trying to order even now about the Afghan population.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (32:19)

So now the Trump administration is now trying to use the tragedy that happened in D.C. as an excuse to say that every immigrant, essentially every immigrant that came into the United States in the last four years, legally or otherwise, is a threat. And they have ordered a re check of every refugee who came into the country. Over 200,000 refugees, every person granted asylum, which is 150,000 to 200,000 people. And as well as they're saying, we also want to look at people who came from travel ban countries. These are the list of countries that President Trump imposed travel restrictions on. And they have suspended granting new applications, suspended all visas that are being granted to Afghans. So we're really looking at an effort to potentially strip legal status or find a way to retroactively go back and deny people their green cards, their asylum, their refugee status. People who came in multiple years ago and have now been here without any trouble. And they want to say we want to go back and like make sure that no corners were cut. Which is ironic when you look at refugees because again, the Trump administration has redefined refugees refugees to include Afrikaners who they say are facing discrimination. But refugee status is supposed to be about facing persecution. And they repeatedly refer to the Afrikaners they're bringing over as facing discrimination. But, you know, that's not a lot of people face discrimination. That is actually not a ground for asylum or refugee status. It has to rise to the level of persecution. And there have been many reports that inside uscis, the message that came out was approve every South African case that you get. So they are on the one hand rushing these people through the system to redefine the refugee system to mean conservatives and white people who they claim are persecuted or discriminated against while going back and saying all of these other refugees who came in, they are all suspicious and we want to find some way to strip their status. And of course beyond that it's, it's more than just refugees. They're now talking re migration and these other white nationalist claims to go about a bigger population.

Bill Kristol (34:21)

No, I want to get to that and close with that because that gets so important, the bigger point. But just on the so the Afghans I know here, there are quite a few in Northern Virginia who cooperated with our military, our intelligence community. That's this guy who had the terrible breakdown and tragically shot and killed people here, national guards, people in D.C. but other people, my people I've gotten to know here in Northern Virginia who did work with us, who've come here, who've built lives. Zero problem with any, you know, law enforcement, their kids are in school and so forth, they're now going to risk of being expelled just in a kind of group punishment kind of way. I mean, is that possibly doable?

Aaron Reichland Melnick (35:02)

This is, I do want to emphasize we don't know exactly what this review process is going to look like. There are a lot of rumors and other things flying around right now. And so the message I can give right now is that we don't have very much concrete. What we know is that they have suspended granting any new status. So anyone who is in the process right now who's an Afghan, including potentially others who come from other travel ban countries like Cuba or Venezuela, they're saying we're taking a pause, we're just not going to look at these and not approve them. You know, people who are scheduled for interviews can still come in, they have their interviews, they can maybe get to the final stage of yes, no, but the Trump admin has said you can't check the box. Yes, no yet. I think you can probably still check the box no, but we're going to suspend all approvals. What they're going to do after that, what they're going to do for the now they've already named in the last two weeks 400, 500,000 cases that they want to re review is not yet clear yet. You know what they're going to do there. But theoretically in some of these cases they could claim that the person was never eligible for the status in the first place and therefore should have their green card or other thing taken away from them. And there is A ground of immigration law where the government can say, we think you weren't eligible for this status, we're going to try to take it away from you for green cards. That can be done in the first five years. And so for a lot of these people, if they have green cards, they'll still be in that period. And the Trump admin might say, well, we're going to try to put you in removal proceedings and strip you of your green card. Now that would have to be individualized. They could not sign a memo that says, everybody who got a green card, you know, from 2021 to 2025, we hereby strip their green card. That's not legal. They can't do anything like that. They would have to do it on an individualized basis. But what that process is going to look like, how many officers they're going to assign to it, how much is this going to be more of a public relations thing than an actual effort to, you know, painstakingly review 500,000 files? It is too early to tell. We will find that out when they reveal more details.

Bill Kristol (37:07)

But if you're living here, suddenly you have this cloud over you and you're, you know, it makes all kinds of decisions problematic and the choices obviously and. Okay, let's talk a minute about the broader thing, which I'm very struck by. I think many people have been, the DHS tweet, embracing remigration, you might say a word about what that term means. And then more broadly, I guess the degree to which it just turns out seems to be turning out that they have embraced what you earlier were just saying, center right and pretty far right and really far right, anti immigration or agendas or let's say restrictionists, maybe more neutral term. And I, I feel like there was some debate a year ago, you and I discussed this on a couple of, in a couple of places. You know, would they be sort of, you know, restrictionist or really aggressively, you know, trying to go after everyone or embracing the most far right version of let's get people who have come here over the last 40 years, get them out of here, get their kids out of here. And I feel like, I mean, somewhat to my surprise, I got it. I don't know really to my surprise, but what I feared, I guess is coming, seems to me to be coming true more than what I had hoped, which is they've gone all the way or they seem to want to be inclined to go all the way towards the most extreme anti immigration agenda. Is that right? Maybe I'm overstating that and explain a little bit what re migration is and all that.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (38:27)

Yeah. So for those who are not familiar with the term, re migration is a phrase that's been around for a few decades. It did not emerge exclusively from the far right, but became adopted by the European far right as a sort of shibboleth, which to them, what it means in the European far right is ethnic cleansing. It means not just deporting people who are present in the country unlawfully, but deporting people who are here legally who don't have citizenship, and even potentially deporting people who have citizenship who are not ethnically European and people with children of immigrants.

Bill Kristol (39:03)

Right. I mean, it's very clear that it's not just the people who came here at age 15 or 35, it's people who, you know, were born in those countries.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (39:12)

And it comes out of this, the European far right's belief that certain peoples are, you know, the very fundamentally racist belief that certain peoples are incompatible with being in Europe. So, you know, the far rights in Germany want to kick out all of the Turks, the far right in France who want to kick out all the Algerians. You know, the far right in England want to kick out all of the Pakistanis and the Bengalis and the Polish and the Albanians. And so you really have this belief that the sort of 20, late 20th century, early 21st century ways in which societies have become more diverse is wrong and they want to go back to having sort of ethnostates. And now, of course, the phrase does did not emerge originally out of that. It wasn't invented by a white supremacist, but it was heavily adapted by it. And the crucial thing about it is that if you don't know that context, it might sound like something you can pitch as well. We want remigration. Well, you know, a moderate politician says that he can just say that and he won't explain what that means. And we see DHS as well, they don't really spell out what that phrase means. And State Department is using this as well. They don't really spell out what it means. And so people who are not familiar with that context might think, well, it just means deporting the undocumented immigrants. But it's not. It is very clearly a wink at this more aggressive attitude of ethnic cleansing. And unfortunately, the President Trump and the Stephen Miller and others really have leaned towards this recently. Recently in a truth social post a couple of days ago, President Trump said, you know, Most of the 53 million immigrants in this country are on welfare or criminals or come from insane asylums. 53 million is I think a high estimate, potentially a little too high. Of every.

Bill Kristol (41:04)

I think he used the term foreign foreigners or foreign countries. Right. Not immigrants. Which actually sounds more ominous. Right. Because they're like not part of the country, you know. Right, yeah.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (41:14)

And of that population, 25 to 26 million of them, about half are naturalized US citizens including his wife. So his wife is in that. Both of his wives, you know, Ivana, who passed away, was also an immigrant. Includes his in laws. It includes many, many people in this administration and their parents are naturalized immigrants that are in that group of 53 million that he so casually slandered. And I do think we've seen now with Stephen Miller has been posting all weekend about how certain cultures are incompatible. And it's starting to sound a lot like the 1920s and the 1910s when the US last passed the great nativist national origins quota bill on the belief pushed by eugenicists that certain cultures were fundamentally incompatible with the United States and therefore should not be permitted to enter center. And the cultures they were particularly concerned about were the Italians and the Jews. And they were wrong then and they're wrong today.

Bill Kristol (42:16)

But I don't think anyone then. I mean I'll just say obviously I wasn't around, but talk to my grandparents and stuff. I don't think anyone thought once they were in and had been in for 10 years or whatever that they were at risk of being sort of retroactively judged incompatible and deported. They certainly were very strict. The walls, the fences came down, so to speak, and no more of them got in and famously up until the actual outset into World War II, so tragically. But yeah. So this is even worse. I mean the idea that we're going to deport, I don't know who. Right. I mean J.D. vance's in laws or something and presumably then that they're considerably their children because they have been judged incompatible. I mean, anyway, it is, it's so striking to have a president, as you say, and senior advisors embracing not just the term but the whole concept that 53 million foreigners is really sent a chill down my spine. You're not talking here about immigrants or people who came in the last four years. Maybe TPS was too generous. That's a legislative decision. Congress could change it, of course, and so forth. We're talking about, we're calling foreigners people who have been here for, well, for decades, obviously, and as you say, generations and we're citizens, half of them. Right.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (43:24)

I mean, yeah, I Gave a talk at St. John's Lafayette Church in Lafayette Square a while back. And I talked about the very first refugee program in the modern era, which was Hungarians brought over from Austrian refugee camps in the early 1950s. And at the end of the talk, a woman in the audience came up to me and said, I was one of those children. I came over at age 5 in 1952. And, you know, so that's. She's in that 53 million population. That woman who came over in 1952 as a US citizen now came over because of refugee status. And it was wonderful getting to talk to her. And you think she is in that group? She is in. And the foreigners that Trump is now attacking. And I think it's really, you know, imperative on those of us who love this country and who love, really, I think, what this country stands for, this belief that anyone can be an American, to stand up for that at a time like this and say, this isn't right. We've done this before as a nation. We've done awful things to immigrants in this nation. We did Japanese internment in the 1880s after Chinese exclusion. Entire communities in the west coast were ethnically purged, you know, with lynch mobs coming and telling every Chinese immigrant that you had to leave, you had 24 hours to leave, or we're going to kill everybody. So we've done some of those ethnic purges before, and they are black moments in our history. And we have to learn from that history and know that we can move past this and that every fear over new ethnic groups has been proven to be wrong over history every single time.

Bill Kristol (44:54)

But also, I mean, the federal government and state governments, I guess, may have turned a blind eye to some of what was happening. And as you say, they certainly were restrictionists in terms of going forward stuff. And there were ethnic pogroms, so to speak, against various groups. But still, we haven't had, to my knowledge, a president of the United States and his senior advisors, in a sense, embracing, since I don't know when, I mean, since. Well, Lincoln addresses this in 1860, embracing the notion that if you came from abroad, you're less of an American than if you've been here for, I don't know how many generations they now want to say 2, 3, 4, 5. You know, I mean, that is explicitly what Lincoln takes on in his famous statements about. There's much, you know, descendants of the generation people, descendants of the Declaration as people who, whose, you know, great grandfathers fought in the revolution, and that's been American dogma. In a good sense, I would say, for almost forever, really. And it is very striking that they've gone that far. They didn't have. I mean, one could have imagined a restrictionist policy that we wouldn't have liked, a lot of demagoguing about immigrants that we would have deplored that didn't go this far. Don't you think, in the real nativist, kind of European nativist direction, one might say, yeah.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (46:05)

And I do think it's crucial to say, despite as we're talking this in very apocalyptic terms about this as a policy measure, we have not yet seen that kind of action. Right now, it is mostly rhetoric. And that's why I said we're keeping an eye on what they're going to do with this effort to strip status. You know, is this going to be just a PR thing where they find five, 10 people and say, you know, we found these people who shouldn't give up status, but the overwhelming majority of people are put in fear, but nothing actually happens to them. It could well be this, and we don't know yet. And of course, the courts will play a role in this. If they really start doing aggressive things, they're going to have problems. And as I've said from the beginning, denaturalization, which, which Trump talked about, stripping citizenship from people who are naturalized immigrants, is actually very for the federal government to do with good reason and not something that they can do at scale. You know, it requires every case requires filing in front of a federal judge and convincing a federal judge after a trial that the person, you know should have their citizenship stripped because they committed fraud or what have you. So it is not an easy thing for the federal government to do. And I don't want to suggest that they're going to do it, but they are talking as if they want to do it. And I think that is extremely notable and a worrying sign of where we're going. Less than a year into the Trump administration, as they are still getting more resources online every single day for deportations.

Bill Kristol (47:28)

And it affects people's social and cultural attitudes, even if it doesn't lead to the government being allowed to do acts of people's interpersonal behavior and so forth, communities and stuff can be affected.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (47:38)

Immigrant communities are in fear right now. And I think if you know anyone who's an immigrant, who's a Latino or others, very few people are insulated from this. In fact, when you look at polling on this issue, Pew Research asked a question. They did a poll of Latinos. They have Pew Hispanic. They Just focuses on polling the Latino population. And we are now at a point where 60% of Latinos say that they think next year will be worse for Latinos than the last. That's, that's up from 30% in Trump's first term. So the Latino population is worried about the Latino population, and that includes tens of millions of people who are US Citizens, native born or naturalized.

Bill Kristol (48:22)

Yikes. No, it is. And then all the money, as you say, we haven't really gone into that, but we've got to stop. But you know, how much, how many more ICE and Border Patrol people will be out there? And we'll see if the courts can check them a little bit. They're trying to. But whether the administration fights that or goes along and how effective that is is these are all questions.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (48:42)

But, yeah, one really point on that that I do think it's important to emphasize, because of course, Congress is going to have to act eventually. All of that money expires in four years, October 1, 2029, that money is gone. They have to have spent all 75 million in the next four years. And unless Congress affirmatively decides to give them more money, it'll be up. And that means they would have to go engage in probably mass firings, because you can't keep, keep that many personnel on board unless Congress increases the funding for it. So we are at a point where Congress, I think we're at a crossroads on this issue. We have, the administration has three and a half years or a little bit more than three years now to continue this aggressive path to mass deportations, after which the money runs out and it's gone and they won't have deported everybody. And so I think it's really important for us to say, is there a better way forward? What can we do? How can we address this? I think paths to legal status and, you know, giving people a way to fix their papers so that we can use these resources if we want to use them, on public safety threats, on people who do have serious criminal records, on recent entrants who've been here for five minutes versus people who've been here for 30 years. And I think that's what the American public at polling consistently shows they want to happen. And I think, you know, what nobody wants is the status quo. And unfortunately, that's what we're getting with inertia in Congress. Yeah.

Bill Kristol (50:09)

And of course, Congress doesn't have to wait three years to act. We always assume it can't do anything because it's controlled by President Trump's party. And President Trump would, I suppose, veto other stuff. But as he derailed that border bill even before he's president in 2024. But, of course, responsible people could step forward. So maybe some will. It would be better if they did. Aaron Reichland Melnick, thank you really very much for joining me today. And joining us, very clarifying and illuminating, if not entirely cheerful discussion, but very important for people to understand what's happening. So thanks so much.

Aaron Reichland Melnick (50:40)

Thank you so much for having me. And I hope to come back and do this again.

Bill Kristol (50:43)

We will probably have to. Yeah. And thank you all for joining us today.