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- [00:00]
Martin DeCaro
History as it happens. January 30, 2026 Origins of the ice machine.
- [00:07]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected, but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.
- [00:17]
Martin DeCaro
President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration.
- [00:20]
Jeremy Suri
Reform and Immigrant Responsibility act of 1996.
- [00:23]
Martin DeCaro
Which allowed migrants to be deported without a judicial hearing.
- [00:27]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
And tonight I announce I will sign an executive order to deny federal contracts businesses that hire illegal immigrants. It is no longer possible to ignore the magnitude of the illegal immigration problem.
- [00:40]
Martin DeCaro
This just in. You are looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there. That is the World Trade center and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers.
- [00:51]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
Release from detention can cause an atmosphere which can create a terroristic act. When I took office, I committed to.
- [01:01]
Jeremy Suri
Fixing this broken immigration system.
- [01:03]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
And I began by doing what I could to secure our borders. Today we have more agents and technology deployed to secure our southern border than at any time in our history. I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they've done. They poisoned.
- [01:22]
Martin DeCaro
The number of people in ICE custody is now at 66,000. Scenes from American cities of paramilitary thugs shooting and assaulting protesters and snatching immigrants have horrified Americans in the age of Trump. But the president did not create this violent federal behemoth. For decades now, Congress has poured billions into enforcement as immigration became a national security issue, demanding a militarized response. How we got to this point Next, as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [02:00]
Jeremy Suri
With the end of the Cold War, there's an effort to downsize a lot of equipment that the military has and and to offload it. And one of the places where equipment is offloaded is on local police forces and then offloaded to some extent as ICE is created in the early 2000s.
- [02:20]
Martin DeCaro
January 1995, President Bill Clinton delivers his State of the Union address.
- [02:25]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more. By hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens. In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes. To better identify illegal aliens in the workplace as recommended by the commission headed by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years. And we must do more to stop it.
- [03:16]
Martin DeCaro
The early to mid-1990s marks an important turning point in this story of how the presence of migrants in the United States became a national security problem to be dealt with not as a civil offense but as but is a serious crime necessitating militarized law enforcement. As the journalist Jonathan Blitzer writes in Everyone who is gone is here two years before the speech you just heard in January 1993. One day around 8 in the morning, a Pakistani national named Mir Amal Khanzi pulled up to a traffic light on Route 123, across the street from the entrance to CIA headquarters in Virginia. He opened the door of a brown Datsun station wagon and fired an AK47 into oncoming traffic, killing two CIA employees and injuring several others. When authorities investigated, they learned that he had applied for asylum because of the backlog. He had obtained a work permit while his application was pending. Then, on February 26, just a month into Clinton's first term, two terrorists bombed the World Trade center, one of whom gained entry after applying for asylum.
- [04:18]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
Task force New York City Police Department, Bomb Squad and the treasury are assuming because of the force of this blast, the incredible force, that it could only have been done using some kind of vehicle that could carry hundreds of pounds of explosives, a kind of car bomb, as we've seen in cases in Lebanon.
- [04:36]
Martin DeCaro
The urgency grew on June 6, when a ship called the Golden Venture crashed ashore along the Rockaway Peninsula in New York between Brooklyn and Queens. 286 Chinese immigrants were on board, each having paid roughly $30,000 to reach the US from the province of Fujian. It was the 24th ship to reach the US from China in the previous 22 months, said one federal immigration official. The third world has packed its bag and it's moving. The aliens have taken control again. That is Jonathan Blitzer in Everyone who is Gone Is Here, his book about the broken immigration system. In 1996, as he prepared to run for re election, President Clinton got behind legislation that would plant the seeds for today's crisis. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility act establish mass deportation as the new centerpiece of American immigration policy, says Blitzer.
- [05:30]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
We are increasing border controls by 50%. We are increasing inspections to prevent the hiring of illegal immigrants. And tonight I announce I will sign an executive order to deny federal contracts to businesses that Hire illegal immigrants.
- [05:45]
Martin DeCaro
The debates in Congress over the legislation presage today's disagreements and controversies.
- [05:50]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
It also streamlines the deportation of criminal aliens, protects American jobs, and holds individuals responsible to support immigrants that they sponsor, and finally, eases the tax burden on all Americans. It is no longer possible to ignore the magnitude of the illegal immigration problem.
- [06:09]
Jeremy Suri
The bill will send genuine refugees back.
- [06:11]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
To their oppressors without having their claims properly considered.
- [06:15]
Martin DeCaro
If a person arrives at the border.
- [06:16]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
Without proper documents, the officer at the border can send that person back without a hearing. Guess who can't get proper papers?
- [06:23]
Jeremy Suri
Refugees.
- [06:24]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
You can't go to the Gestapo or the KGB and say, I'm trying to escape your oppression. Please give me the proper papers so.
- [06:30]
Martin DeCaro
I can go to America. Five years later, the most important turning point of all. 9 11, 2001.
- [06:36]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
And we have an eyewitness on the telephone who tells us that he has seen an airplane crash into the World Trade Center. His name is Tony Arrigo. He is on East 12th Street. Tony, can you please tell us what you're doing?
- [06:46]
Jeremy Suri
Yes, sir.
- [06:46]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
I can tell you what happened. I was taking the garbage out of the building when we heard this roaring engines coming. We looked up and there was a plane. Next thing you know, we heard boom. We ran up to the corner and hit right into the World Trade Center.
- [06:59]
Martin DeCaro
All 19 hijackers were in the country on temporary visas. Four had violated the terms of those visas. From here on out, immigration was feared as a potential source of terrorism. The Department of Homeland Security was established the following year. Within it, ice, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
- [07:16]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
The war on terror. The American people are showing tremendous strength, great resolve. Our unity is a great weapon in this fight. And by acting together to create a new and single Department of Homeland Security, we'll be sending this world a signal that the Congress and the administration will work together to protect the American people.
- [07:35]
Martin DeCaro
And as Blitzer notes, immigrants became the main source of the government's concern. This hearing, held after 9 11, was typical of the frightening moment in the nation's history.
- [07:45]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
So we are anxious to hear the testimony. The question of detention that may lead to or release from detention that may lead to terrorism is not just an imagined possibility, far flung possibility, but rather the testimony will demonstrate that, indeed, that's a reality.
- [08:12]
Martin DeCaro
Budgets exploded along with a number of deportations, while at the same time, under Presidents Bush and then Obama, the latter would be called the deporter in chief. Immigration reform legislation failed to pass time and again.
- [08:24]
Jeremy Suri
But for a year and a half.
- [08:25]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
Now, Republican leaders in the House have refused to allow that simple vote.
- [08:30]
Martin DeCaro
So the system remained broken while the deportations made possible by enormous enforcement budgets ballooned. From 1996 to 2014, the US deported four and a half million non citizens. More than three million came after the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, and most of these occurred at the southern border, according to scholars Kelsey Norman and Nicholas Machinsky, over a 20 year period starting in 2003. So from the aftermath of 911 into the Biden presidency, Congress allocated approximately $24 toward immigration enforcement carried out by ICE and Border Patrol for every $1 spent on the immigration court system that handles asylum claims. In other words, the money spent on enforcement was 24 times higher than the money spent on reforming the broken asylum system. Even under Biden, who is criticized for being too lenient, 3 million border crossers were sent back. What has changed under President Trump, especially in this second term, is the focus on deportations, including many non criminals from the country's interior communities across the country.
- [09:36]
Jeremy Suri
Bracing for an ICE crackdown to kick.
- [09:39]
Martin DeCaro
Into high gear now those deportation raids sparking new protests over using a federal force in combat gear carrying the instruments of war. So as outrageous and inhumane as Trump's policies are, they are not without precedent. Trump himself, when running the first time, told 60 Minutes he wanted to emulate a mass deportation scheme from the Eisenhower era known as Operation Wetback.
- [10:09]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
What's the largest deportation operation in the history of our country, even larger than that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower? It is a manifest right of our government to limit the number of immigrants our nation can absorb.
- [10:24]
Martin DeCaro
These people were just rounded up, put.
- [10:26]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
On trucks and buses, driven over the.
- [10:28]
Martin DeCaro
Border, dumped on the other side, sometimes in the desert. In one case, 88 people died from sunstroke. Again, that's from 60 Minutes in 2015. So let's dive deeper now with historian Jeremy Surrey at the University of Texas at Austin. You can check out his work on Substack at Democracy of Hope newsletter and his podcast this Is Democracy. Our Conversation Next Tap. Subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads or go to historyasithappens.com Jeremy Suri, welcome back.
- [11:00]
Jeremy Suri
Good to be with you, Martin.
- [11:01]
Martin DeCaro
You were last with me in our Year in Review episode at the end of December. What a year this month has been. My goodness.
- [11:08]
Jeremy Suri
Absolutely. What a decade this month has been.
- [11:11]
Martin DeCaro
And not for good reasons. We're going to talk about what's been happening in American cities, Minnesota, but the origins of this crisis. Let's start big picture here. We're talking about an enforcement apparatus that Donald Trump did not create, maybe he's using it differently, more aggressively than his predecessors. We're talking about a decades long effort to turn immigration into a national security problem.
- [11:36]
Jeremy Suri
It goes back actually before 9 11, but it's worth saying something to start about 911 right now. In the aftermath of the September 11th horrible terrorist attacks, one of the concerns that came out of that was that we were not doing enough as a country to coordinate among domestic agencies to deal with people who were coming into the United States, such as the 19 terrorists on September 11 who had come in legally on various visas, but for example, were training to fly aircraft. And no one, except for one or two FBI agents really noted that or communicated that. And so one of the reforms that came out of September 11th was the creation of the Department of homeland security in 2003 and the creation of ICE, which is the agency now that we're talking about. Border Patrol already existed. The idea was to create more coordination, to have a cap secretary who focused on homeland security, which included now immigration, and to make this a national security issue with national security priority, rather than an issue that was dealt with by agencies on an agency by agency basis.
- [12:43]
Martin DeCaro
What's also been disturbing for people to see is the militarization of immigration enforcement. What is really a paramilitary of men in combat gear carrying the instruments of war, as one article Bought put it. There's a photo actually in this article in the New York Times of a woman opening her front door, and it looks like 7 or 8 seal team 6 pointing rifles at her. How did that happen? Where does this come from? Because there's also been a militarization of police, regular police forces as well in our country.
- [13:13]
Jeremy Suri
Right. And this is why it's great to be a historian, because we can trace multiple causes for things, and there are at least a couple of causes for this. One is actually with the end of the Cold War, there's an effort to downsize a lot of equipment that the military has and to offload it. And one of the places where equipment is offloaded is on local police forces and then offloaded to some extent as ice is created in the early 2000s. So some of this is actually repurposed military equipment. There's also an effort to beef up, starting with the New York Police Department, but then other police departments follow that to beef up the capabilities of military enforcement by police departments because of concerns about terrorism. So the New York Police Department creates its own paramilitary counterterrorist unit. Other police forces do their own version of that. They get federal grants, and then the third thing that we're really seeing right now is the effort to create through the Department of Homeland Security, what are now seen not just as law enforcement capabilities, but national security capabilities, which therefore involve the ability to do much more. And it's not just the weapons you're seeing, it's the intelligence, it's the surveillance. What we're not seeing on the back end are all the people that ICE and other agencies have that are monitoring.
- [14:26]
Martin DeCaro
People, communications, for example, and the Patriot act and all of that too. Post 9 11. I do want to focus more on the recent past here, last three or four decades, but a word or two about the Eisenhower years. Operation Wetback it was called, which is a derogatory term. There are also some deportation, mass deportation schemes early in the 20th century. The sheer brutality of what we're witnessing today is also not unprecedented. There were times when the United States was pretty rough with people who are not in the country legally. And in these operations, they were rounding up people who were citizens and chucking them across the border. Including in Operation Wetback.
- [15:04]
Jeremy Suri
The operations under the Eisenhower years, certainly going back to the Mitchell Palmer raids. He was Attorney General after World War I. You saw people forcibly removed from the United States. Emma Goldman, for example, and various others. So there is a tradition, unfortunately, of brutal deportation of people, even people who have been here a long time and in some cases have even been citizens. I don't think we've seen it on this scale, though what we saw in Minneapolis has some precedent. But generally, when you saw militarization like that in American cities, it usually came from the cities themselves. You think of Bull Connor and other local enforcement of Jim Crow in the south in the 1950s. You don't think of the federal government doing this. Even if you go back to the 20th century, generally the federal government didn't have the capabilities. And under the Posse Comitatus act From the late 19th century, the federal government cannot use the US military for these roles. So there weren't troops to do this until we created this huge ICE force in recent years.
- [16:09]
Martin DeCaro
And there's no emergency or crisis here. So the LA riots after the Rodney King thing in the early 1990s, President George H.W. bush made a declaration of some kind. I can't remember exactly what it was.
- [16:21]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
There are 3,000 National Guardsmen on duty in the city of Los Angeles. Another 2200 stand ready to provide immediate support. To supplement this effort, I've taken several additional actions. First, this morning I have ordered the justice department to dispatch 1,000 federal riot trained law enforcement officials to help restore order in Los Angeles beginning tonight. These officials include FBI SWAT teams, special riot control units of the US Marshals Service, the Border Patrol, and other federal law enforcement agencies. Second, another 1,000 federal law enforcement officials are on standby alert, should they be needed. Third, early today, I directed 3000 members of the 7th Infant infantry and 1500 Marines to stand by at El Toro.
- [17:17]
Martin DeCaro
Air Station, California, a large militarized response to try to contain those riots. In this case, I think what's shocking to people is brutality that usually was not seen, was kind of invisible to American eyes at the border is now being inflicted on communities, workplaces, courthouses, and protesters.
- [17:37]
Jeremy Suri
I think of this as fundamentally different from what we saw after the Rodney King riots or what we saw, for instance, in Washington, D.C. after Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968, what we saw in Los Angeles and Watts in Detroit in 1968. In all of those cases, the US military was brought in, but they were not brought in to deport people. They were not brought in to pull people out of their homes. They were not doing that. Instead, what they were doing was trying to prevent violence. They were stopping people who were in the midst of violent commissions. If someone was to be arrested and pulled out of their home for a crime that was done by local law enforcement, not by the military. What's different here is we have federal forces coming into people's homes, knocking on their doors, and even claiming the right to enter without a warrant. You have to go to the Palmer Raids, you have to go to some of these extreme situations. But even then, when you go to that history of 1919, it's on a much smaller scale. Martin.
- [18:37]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, and I'm not sure they look like they're about to assault Fallujah either. We'll get into more of that when we reach the 911 point in our chronology here. All right. Mid 1990s. I began the podcast with a clip From President Clinton's 1995 State of the Union address, where he talks about illegal immigration in the budget.
- [18:55]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
I will present to you. We will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace as recommended by the commission headed by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.
- [19:09]
Martin DeCaro
And then the following year, 96, when he's running for election, he addresses illegal immigration again.
- [19:14]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
This administration has taken a strong stand to stiffen the protection of our borders.
- [19:20]
Martin DeCaro
There was a major bill passed that year. How important is this piece of legislation in 96 when it comes to Planting the seeds to create this law enforcement behemoth that President Trump is now using today. That's part one of the question, Jeremy. Part two is why did Clinton move to the center or even to the right on immigration?
- [19:41]
Jeremy Suri
So I think the 1996 legislation is absolutely crucial. What it does is it emphasizes enforcement and it emphasizes military like responses to what is happening. It moves the Democratic Party and it moves the country honestly away from where it was with Ronald Reagan when he signed immigration legislation that first of all provided amnesty to people in the United States. It enforced the border, but it did not seek to undertake to deport people who had committed crimes at the same scale. Clinton was trying to show he was tougher on crime, and it made that the standard for judging immigration enforcement it legitimized is the way I think I would put it, far greater use of force to deport people. And so it seems strange, but both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama actually put a lot of resources into deportations. Until Trump, Obama was the deporter in chief. So it aligns the federal government less with what Reagan was aligning it with, which was providing for visas for those who work, providing amnesty for those who have proven themselves. They've been here a long time. Reagan grants amnesty to millions of Americans. What instead is happening here is we're going the other direction. We're putting more emphasis on removing people, even if they've behaved and obeyed the law, removing them because they have broken the law by being in the country illegally.
- [21:03]
Martin DeCaro
And why did Clinton do this? He moved to the center on this issue.
- [21:06]
Jeremy Suri
At the center of Clinton's entire politics was to try to show the country and to do effectively what he did, which was that on crime, he was tough. He was not a traditional Democrat. Remember when Michael Dukakis ran against George H.W. bush in 1988, he was accused of being weak on crime, of allowing Willie Horton, the infamous Willie Horton ads, allowing Willie Horton out of jail as killer who then went and killed again or committed crimes again. What Clinton was trying to show was that he was different from Dukakis, that he was tough on crime. And one way to be tough on crime is to pass a crime bill, which he did. Another way to be tough on crime was to show you were going to use more force for immigration enforcement.
- [21:42]
Martin DeCaro
I have Jonathan Blitzer's great book here, Everyone who is Gone is Here, which is a history of our immigration breakdown, the breakdown of the system. Part of what was happening was that the asylum system was never designed to handle as many applications or people that would come into the country. So so many asylum applications were turned down, but in the meantime, those people were allowed to stay in the country on work papers, work documents. But eventually there's a backlash to this, and that's what we're discussing here, mid-1990s with the immigration act under Clinton. Under that legislation, an undocumented person could not get on a path to legal status through marriage or sponsorship by a family member. If she had been in the US without documentation for six months, she had to leave the country for three years before reapplying for entry. And she had lived in the US without papers for a year, she'd be required to leave for another 10 before returning. So the unintended consequence here, Jeremy, I'm sure you can guess what happened. People wound up staying instead of going back and forth. And we have more illegal or undocumented people in the country anyway, right?
- [22:49]
Jeremy Suri
I mean, the system gets overloaded. That's what Blitzer's describing. It gets overloaded for a few reasons. The main one being that it's still a fundamentally 1970s, 1980s system. In the 2000s, we have different kinds of people coming from different parts of the world in different numbers, and we have different demand structures. The system we have in place was largely built before we had a tech community, when Central America and Mexico looked different. And so the system is overloaded. And you get, as you would expect when a system is overloaded, you get perverse incentives. The incentives for honest people are not to follow the rules, because if they follow the rules, they can't stay. So the incentives for honest people is to try to stay, even if they have to stay illegally. And we all know people who did that. They probably worked on your roof. They probably worked on your garden. Our country has needed and continues to need that labor. That's the perversity of this, Martin, that we've created a system that makes it hard for those people to stay, but yet we need them and want them to take care of our children, but yet we're saying they were here illegally, and then we arbitrarily then go after them and deport them.
- [23:51]
Martin DeCaro
And I want to get to 9, 11 next. But one more point here about the origins of this in the 1990s and so many of these issues. I mean, I could be saying 1990s, they sound like they're being pulled from the headlines today. And Jeremy, you're an expert on the intersection of domestic and foreign policy. American Cold War foreign policy in Latin America led to a lot of migration to our country. Because of the destabilizing effects, a lot of people coming to the US during the middle of the Clinton years were from Mexico. Nafta. Explain how NAFTA exacerbated illegal immigration.
- [24:24]
Jeremy Suri
What NAFTA did was it allowed for more production, the low wage production, to occur in Mexico and in the maquiladoros and elsewhere, which brought down the cost of products for us. What that did in reverse was create an incentive for those who were potential high wage earners to come to the United States. NAFTA also made itself easier for people to come and study in the United States, for people to move. The whole idea was to move goods and to some extent to move people back and forth across the border. So that created more incentives for those who are high wage earners or potential high wage earners to come to the United States. The other thing that happens at the same time as NAFTA is you do have the growth of drug cartels within Mexico. Some of that has to do with problems of governance in Mexico. Some of that has to do with the drug cartels themselves taking advantage of more open, porous border for products of one kind or another. And with drug violence, people flee that violence by coming north to the United States. And we probably all know people who came to the United States fleeing gang violence or something related to that, either in Mexico or in some other Central American country. Most of these people came to the United States not because they wanted to come to United States, but they come to the United States because they wanted to get out of the places they were being violently treated.
- [25:38]
Martin DeCaro
NAFTA opened up the Mexican agribusiness, the agricultural sector, to US Competition. And Mexican subsistence farmers could not survive. Their farms floated away. These people started migrating north, maybe to a city in Mexico to get a job there, but they would continue to migrate over the border into the United States, where the wages, of course, would be higher.
- [25:59]
Jeremy Suri
The bargain that Carlos Salinas, the president of Mexico, made with NAFTA was to try to move the Mexican economy towards industrialization. And so what you saw in 19th century America, you saw in, in late 20th century Mexico, which is people leaving, as you say, leaving farms for cities and those who are still agricultural workers looking for other farms to go to. And those farms are often in the Central Valley of California or in Texas. And that's where they had jobs. And it's still a very high proportion of American farm labor. To people who pick our fruit from the farm and help the grocery store deliver it to us, they are migrant labor. They go back and forth across the border to this day.
- [26:37]
Martin DeCaro
And Clinton also responding to nativism on the Gingrich.
- [26:40]
Jeremy Suri
Right.
- [26:41]
Martin DeCaro
As well. So 9 11, I mean, it's self evident what happened here. The hijackers are all living in the United States on visas. But it wasn't inevitable. Something that had been treated as a civil offense, being in the country illegally or immigration more broadly, would now be handled as some kind of criminal terrorist offense. So budgets explode. Right. The amount of money the country would now spend on enforcement, immigration enforcement, enforcement, while at the same time not reforming the system itself. That's a huge factor here, right, on this road toward the brutal enforcement we're seeing today.
- [27:15]
Jeremy Suri
Yeah, well, I mean, the first thing that happens is what exactly we see as historians happening after any crisis. There's an immediate effort to address the most obvious, superficial reason for the crisis and what people see as the continuing threat. And even all kinds of enlightened people believe that after 9 11, that there were people coming into our country every following day or trying to come into our country who were trying to do harm to our country. So there was a real effort to close off the country to foreigners, particularly foreigners who looked Muslim, who looked threatening, whatever that meant to different people. And so that's the initial reaction. And then there's also an effort to create bodies that are better agencies, organizations, homeland security being the umbrella for them, that would be better at enforcement. And so resources are thrown their way. That's the way politicians show they care. And those resources then create, in a sense, a immigration military industrial complex. And that's what we've been watching in Minneapolis is an immigration military industrial complex.
- [28:16]
Martin DeCaro
The actual number of terrorists who immigrate into the country is minuscule. So the number of people who get caught up in the dragnet is many, many tens of thousands. As ICE is established after 911 and new exploding budgets, it just gets so out of balance.
- [28:36]
Jeremy Suri
One of the hard things though, about studying this as a scholar is it's hard to know who and how many people we stopped. That's the challenge. Right. And that's why there's always an argument for having a bigger dragnet and putting more people out there. It's very hard to convince a politician, Martin, to say, we're doing enough, let's reduce immigration enforcement now. Because they're worried the day they do that there'll be a terrorist incident. And we did have a few attempted at terrorist incidents. The underwear bomber, the person who tried to come across the border, someone else in CA from Canada, I think, on the, on the West Coast So there were enough little pinpricks to be worried that there was more. Who knows? Our immigration enforcement, even as excessive as it was, might have deterred some people from trying. So that's what makes this a really hard issue. And it's only obvious that you didn't have enough enforcement after an incident occurs or that you had too much enforcement after an incident in the other direction occurs.
- [29:28]
Martin DeCaro
September 2002, the Justice Department launched a program, reading from Blitzer, which required immigrants from 25 countries, all of which were Muslim populations except for North Korea, to submit their names to a government database that vetted them for involvement with terrorism. 138,000 immigrants registered. Out of that, 138,000 who registered, 12,000 of whom wound up in detention. I'll add. How many were actually terrorists?
- [29:55]
Jeremy Suri
Yeah, very few, if any. Right. I mean, of course. So this is not a defense of the excessive anti immigration dragnet that's created, but it is to say the alternative of doing nothing was not an alternative either. That was politically viable and not politically. Yeah. And so the challenge is, how do we effectively address this? And we didn't. I think that's the one thing we can agree on. What we did was not effective.
- [30:18]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah. And we were two decades out now, more than two decades out, a quarter century out, and we're still treating immigration as a national security problem with a militarized response. But before we get to present day, I just kind of jumped over the end of Bush, Obama, Biden, first, Trump. Both Bush and Obama tried immigration reform. The rhetoric from Bush and Obama pretty much identical on this issue, on the need to be tough. But we also want to have a.
- [30:44]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
Heart that if you got people coming here to do jobs Americans aren't doing, we need to figure out a way that they can do so in a legal basis for a temporary period of time. And that's why we're going to keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security felons, not families.
- [31:01]
Jeremy Suri
Both Bush and Obama recognizes for economic reasons, not just cultural, we needed immigrants, we need engineers, for example.
- [31:09]
Martin DeCaro
Why did those reform efforts both fail both presidencies?
- [31:12]
Jeremy Suri
Because of far right efforts to play to nativist prejudices, it became very powerful to argue that foreigners were stealing jobs, that foreigners were committing crimes, and that foreigners were terrorists. And a small but vocal group, particularly in the Republican Party, the Tea Party is what it begins as, captures the party.
- [31:31]
Martin DeCaro
The conversation continues. Become a subscriber and never listen to ads again. Tap, subscribe now in the show notes or go to history as it happens. Dot com. Bush also changed the focus somewhat away from the border. And there were some workplace raids, especially the end of his presidency. Obama then wanted to prioritize or reprioritize deportations. Janet Napolitano wanted to get away from those interior deportations and focus more on the border. I mean, over the last two, three decades, the overwhelming majority of deportations have come at the border, but there have been these periods where there was more internal deportations. How did the country react when the Bush workplace raids near the end of his presidency? Did people have a visceral reaction to those?
- [32:28]
Jeremy Suri
It was the largest single immigration raid in the country. 700 warrants, 300 arrests.
- [32:33]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
Agri Processors, a kosher meatpacking plant, lost three quarters of its workforce.
- [32:39]
Jeremy Suri
And tiny Postville, Iowa, I would say.
- [32:41]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
We lost a good third of our people.
- [32:43]
Jeremy Suri
So this is a terrific question, and it's really important. The workplace raids were terribly unpopular, even among Republicans. Business leaders didn't like this. And the reason Janet Napolitano moved back toward emphasis on the border is because you could do it on the border in a way that was less offensive to Americans and less disruptive. Not just disruptive to cities, but disruptive to business. And so here's the thing, right? Americans have continuously, for the last 20 years, supported Strong, sometimes even brutal border enforcement, but they have opposed consistently, efforts by militarized and law enforcement agencies to deport people from within the country. We want to see the militarization at the border, but not in our cities, in our workplaces, in our communities. And that distinction is what the Obama administration learned from the Bush administration, the.
- [33:37]
Martin DeCaro
Trump administration forgot that was immigration enforcement militarized under Obama, even as they reprioritized the focus on criminals. I remember this. I've been reading about it to prepare for the conversation. Are gonna get the worst criminals out of the country and also focus on border securing the border rather than the internal workplace stuff.
- [33:56]
Jeremy Suri
Yes, Obama is depicted now by some as being weak on the border, but in fact, he was criticized by most on the left for being too militarized on the border. And he was. So there were major allocations and appropriations for equipment on the border, use of surveillance as not before, efforts even to use early drones and other technology there. So, yes, this became a militarized space. And many of the individuals who now work for Trump actually began their careers working on these border issues actually under Obama. People like Tom Bowman and others.
- [34:28]
Martin DeCaro
Or Homan. Tom Homan.
- [34:29]
Jeremy Suri
So there is a militarization that goes back at least to Obama, and it certainly increases then but it's militarization mostly at the border, not inside communities. That distinction is pretty important for the administration today.
- [34:42]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
We have more agents and technology deployed to secure our southern border than at any time in our history. And over the past six years, illegal border crossings have been cut by more than half.
- [34:53]
Martin DeCaro
But here's the thing. We're talking now three decades of more and more enforcement. Was it effective, even after millions of deportations and enormous budgets, to again militarize enforcement? I don't think it's been effective. And I think it tears at the social fabric of the country.
- [35:10]
Jeremy Suri
No, I actually think as a historian we can say that. And it's true for the United States, but it's true for other countries, too. The hardest thing to secure is a border, especially from people who want to get across that border for life and death. There will be people coming across the American border so long as there are economic incentives and so long as there are life incentives for them. When people are fleeing, whether it is my Jewish ancestors or Central American families today, when they are fleeing violence and oppression and when they are seeking some way to feed their children, it's very hard to keep them out. And we know these stories of people who try time and time again. What happens when you militarize the border, as we've seen, is all you're doing is pushing people to come in a different way and for different kinds of people to come in one way or another. And you get into a really deathly spiral of trying to find one draconian measure after another. Notice what's happened under the Trump administration. First we militarize the border, then we send ICE into cities. Now we're saying we're going to cancel H1B visas. So we're not going to recruit the top engineers to our country. Is that really the top scientists? We'd rather they go to China. That's really what we want to do. I think people are going to find ways to try to get talent into this country to run their companies. And so you cannot use military force to effectively manage a border. It's more a political and sociological issue. If you don't want people to come into your country, you've got to give them reason to stay where they are.
- [36:44]
Martin DeCaro
Well, the so called root causes issue that Kamala Harris was designated to handle in Latin American countries, that takes a long time to turn around. So we'll wrap up here. Jeremy, you wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal that ICE needs the Doge treatment. It's funny how I don't like the pendulum metaphor. But Biden was too lenient, tried to have a more humane, accepting immigration policy when he took over. So there was a backlash because Biden was too lenient. Too many people came into the country. Now we're seeing, oh, well, this is what it actually looks like when you want to try to deport a million people in a year. Pick it up from there.
- [37:21]
Jeremy Suri
So my point in this Wall Street Journal piece, which was, I really had fun writing that title because I'm not a fan of Doge. And I think the biggest and most persuasive argument, the most important argument against what ICE is doing is the argument we've already made here, that it's horrible, it undermines values that are more important to us. It is no point in trying to deport people to save our democracy when the act of deporting them, destroying our democracy. It's as simple as that. And you're not making communities safer when you're killing the people like Renee Goode and Alex Pretty when you're killing good citizens for the purpose of protecting those citizens. This is like Vietnam, where we're destroying the village to save the village we've destroyed and occupied Minneapolis to try to make it safer. That makes no sense. The point of my Wall Street Journal piece, why I said we should give ICE the Doge treatment, is one of the arguments behind doge. DOGE terribly mishandled this. But one of the legitimate arguments behind Doge was that there's waste in government and that government should be more focused on managing people's resources better for outcomes that serve taxpayers. I embrace that principle. By that principle, by any principle of decent management from any business school. Homeland Security and ICE are terribly managed. Put all the moral arguments aside, right? They've received an infusion of money, a budget from 10 billion to $85 billion. They've more than doubled their forces. They've reduced training. The quality of recruitment has gone down. The quality of their product has declined. If you were running this as any organization, you would say we need to fire the leadership, bring in new leaders to reorganize. Because if we're making more hamburgers, but they stink and no one wants to eat them, it doesn't matter that we're making more hamburgers. We have more ICE agents, but they're making our society worse. They're not doing their job well. It needs to be dojed. It needs to be reorganized, as any failed organization would be. And let's be very clear, Christy Noem, as Secretary of Homeland Security, has proven Herself incompetent to lead an organization. Politics aside, she is not competent. She needs to be replaced with a new CEO, and that needs to happen immediately.
- [39:30]
Martin DeCaro
In normal time, she would have been long gone. Never. She would never have been confirmed to begin with. Last thing here, though. You know, Jeremy, when it comes to national security and cutting budgets, it's just so darn hard. I mean, ICE's budget has exploded even past the post 9 11.
- [39:46]
Jeremy Suri
Double the Marine budget, double the money we give to the Marines.
- [39:50]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, so it went up a lot after 9 11. Basically, it was a blank check from Congress and now even more money because the Trump administration, as mentioned, wanted to do a million deportations in a year and even build what could be called concentration camps or holdings pens for people. I guess I don't see that in the near future. A dramatic cut to the ICE budget and a reorientation for our immigration problem that it's not a national security problem or not. At least to this extent.
- [40:17]
Jeremy Suri
I think, unfortunately, you're right. We will, especially under this administration. Even with a new Congress, the rhetoric will still be about this as a national security problem. And unfortunately, that rhetoric might still work for a lot of listeners. Maybe some people, you know, maybe some of your listeners believe that too. But I do think the bloom is off the rose for ice. It's very hard, even for conservatives. I had lunch with a very prominent conservative business person recently, and he'd be the first to admit that this is a terribly run organization. The money's been misspent. They have too much money.
- [40:46]
Martin DeCaro
And Border Patrol, too.
- [40:48]
Jeremy Suri
Border Patrol too, Exactly. So I do think we're gonna see a major reorientation. A reorientation not away from all the bad things, but certainly a reorientation to. To not be doing what they've been doing in Minneapolis. My guess is that we will continue to see ICE doing things in cities, but they're going to try to take a lower profile and they're going to try to do it in ways. Which is what Homan and others are arguing for now. Right. Doing it. Arresting people who are already in prison rather than walking the streets and going to courthouses and schools and gas stations and things like that.
- [41:19]
Martin DeCaro
I did mention Border Patrol because we don't want to see brutality down there either. And there's been a well documented record, record recently and going back decades of Border Patrol shooting to kill.
- [41:29]
Jeremy Suri
Yes. And that's probably what is behind what happened in Minneapolis. Right. I mean, it's the old story of what you do in one area pervades and seeps into another area. And that's what we've seen here. It should also be said border issues not only have been a problem in what we've been doing there, but what it's been doing to the people we send there on our side, which is to say members of the military who were deployed to down there, members of the National Guard. This doesn't get enough coverage. There's a very high suicide rate National Guardsmen in Texas who have been sent to the border Department of Public Safety people, they don't like working there. The brutality is brutality they feel as well. And it's very expensive in Texas. One of the biggest expenditures in the state now is actually overtime for Department of Public Safety people at the border. So there's an argument about the brutality that we need to address, but also about the expense and the effect it has on the people we send in. In law enforcement there. Talk to any National Guardsmen. They don't want to go there, even though they're often sent there.
- [42:28]
Political Figure (e.g., Bill Clinton or Donald Trump)
Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records ordered deported from our country are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens. The number of new illegal immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total from 2015. They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.
- [43:25]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of History As It Happens. Who was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor? We'll speak to his biographer, Edward Luce of the Financial Times next as we report his trip history as it Happens. Make sure to sign up for my newsletter to keep tabs on what I'm doing here. Just go to Substack and search for History As It Happens.