How Congress Could Bring ICE to a Store Near You

Summary

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Podcast Summary: It Could Happen Here — How Congress Could Bring ICE to a Store Near You

Episode Date: August 6, 2026
Host: Kevin Foster (Cool Zone Media)
Guests: District Attorney Laura Conover (Pima County, AZ), James (Legal Expert)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Kevin Foster critically examines the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA), recently passed by the House, which enables the Department of Homeland Security and ICE to play a much larger role in retail surveillance and law enforcement, with especially severe consequences for immigrants in the US. The show unpacks how lobbying, inflated statistics, and bipartisan political support have set the stage for a sweeping expansion of federal surveillance and deportation powers—with many practical, legal, and ethical repercussions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Manufactured Crises: Retail and Cargo Theft

• The episode opens with a review of recent “national security” narratives around organized retail crime and cargo theft.
• Kevin Foster highlights the “multi-year propaganda campaign” by the retail lobby (02:18), which exaggerated loss statistics to push for harsher policing and new legislation.
• Cargo theft figures are similarly inflated, with estimates ranging from $725 million to a speculative $60 billion, mostly through “vibes” and “unnamed experts.” (03:00–04:15)
• Advances in AI and logistics tech may worsen cargo theft by making theft easier via impersonation, not through old-fashioned heists. (03:40)

2. What is CORCA? Why Is It a Problem?

• CORCA now defines organized retail crime as a national security threat, justifying federal intervention via Homeland Security and ICE. (05:00–07:00)
• The act sets up a DHS-run “Coordination Center” headed by an ICE director, enabling deep federal-local-private law enforcement coordination.
• Worryingly, the law allows ICE broad access to stores’ confidential customer data if deemed “operationally necessary”—a term intentionally left vague. (07:30–08:30)
  • Quote: “ICE is essentially given full discretion over what data they can collect. If anyone questions them, they'll likely just say, ‘We need to play it safe. Because organized retail crime is a matter of national security that could finance drug and weapons trafficking harming Americans.’” — Kevin Foster (08:10)

3. Retail Surveillance as a Tool for Deportation

• The episode stresses that existing facial recognition data and AI-powered surveillance in stores are now potential assets for ICE.
• ICE already has access to massive biometric databases (e.g., Fortify app, over 200M images from various federal/state sources). (09:15–10:30)
• Past data-sharing practices (Oregon DMV, Wegmans sharing “persons of interest” data with police) set a precedent for stores becoming ICE partners. (10:45–11:30)

4. Civil Liberties and the Permanent Expansion of DHS Power

• CORCA provides no requirements to dismantle or delete data should the act sunset; surveillance and data-sharing may become permanent. (11:45)
• Civil rights coalitions oppose the act, warning it will entrench and expand DHS’s domestic authority, especially over state and local law enforcement via federal grants. (11:45–12:06)
• Despite warnings, the bill enjoys strong bipartisan support, especially after being added to the National Defense Authorization Act by Senators Grassley and Durbin. (12:00–12:40)
  • Quote: “It’s kind of hard to tell how they wouldn’t have seen this coming, especially with progressive groups warning them about it.” — Kevin Foster (12:22)

5. Community Responses and Resistance Strategies

• ICE’s capacity for enforcement may be limited, but the infrastructure exists and is expanding.
• Mutual aid efforts have helped protect immigrant communities (e.g., grocery delivery, day laborer defense groups during ICE surges in Los Angeles and Hillsborough, OR). (15:45–16:30)
• Avoiding store loyalty programs and shopping at stores with less data collection are suggested practical strategies. (16:40)

6. Local Prosecutors’ Perspectives: DA Laura Conover

• DA Laura Conover critiques CORCA and the earlier Lake and Riley Act (2025), which mandates detention of non-citizens arrested (not convicted!) for certain crimes, incentivizing ICE crackdowns at the retail level. (17:25–19:15)
• Example: Jessica Corrales Duarte’s case, where a DACA recipient lost status and parental rights after a shoplifting arrest led to immediate ICE detention, before due process could play out locally. (19:20–21:20)
  • Quote: “The result was just defendants disappearing into federal custody and before any normal process. So you've got a victim who's now totally out of luck for any kind of restoration... So victims' rights are violated. The defendant obviously gets no due process.” — DA Laura Conover (20:29)

7. Legal Mechanisms: “Moral Turpitude” & Immigration

• Crimes like theft are categorized as “moral turpitude,” making even long-time residents inadmissible or deportable upon conviction; enhanced sentencing under state law further worsens this risk. (25:45–28:30)
  • Quote: “One of these sentencing enhancements at a state level results in somebody now having, for federal immigration terms, a conviction of a crime involving moral turpitude. They are now inadmissible. A single conviction... can make a noncitizen deportable if it has a possible sentence for a year or more.” — James (Legal Expert) (28:07–28:55)

8. Consequences of Surveillance Infrastructure

• The new law could lead to widespread warrantless surveillance, mistaken identity, and constitutional violations, as seen in cases involving faulty facial recognition and platforms like Palantir’s “Elite.” (23:09–24:45)
• Technology is especially unreliable for women and people of color, multiplying civil rights risks. (23:45–24:15)

9. The Larger Picture: State Power and Social Solutions

• The ever-expanding reach of the law and surveillance is backed by force and inevitably results in violence or community damage, especially when enacted by ICE.
  • Quote: “Every single law is backed up by violence. Doesn't matter if it's a parking ticket or murder. The state can lock you up, beat you up or shoot you up. That is the basis on which all laws rest.” — James (Legal Expert) (29:26–29:45)
• The solution, according to both guests, lies in stronger communities, mutual aid, and meeting each other’s material needs rather than expanding policing and surveillance. (30:22–31:23)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [08:10] Kevin Foster: “ICE is essentially given full discretion over what data they can collect. If anyone questions them, they'll likely just say, ‘We need to play it safe. Because organized retail crime is a matter of national security...’”
• [12:22] Kevin Foster: “It’s kind of hard to tell how they wouldn’t have seen this coming, especially with progressive groups warning them about it.”
• [20:29] DA Laura Conover: “The result was just defendants disappearing into federal custody and before any normal process... victims’ rights are violated. The defendant obviously gets no due process.”
• [28:07] James: “One of these sentencing enhancements at a state level results in somebody now having, for federal immigration terms, a conviction of a crime involving moral turpitude. They are now inadmissible...”
• [29:26] James: “Every single law is backed up by violence... The state can lock you up, beat you up or shoot you up. That is the basis on which all laws rest.”
• [31:23] James: “We need to work out a way to meet each other’s material needs... if your neighbors aren’t hungry—and to know if your neighbors are hungry, you have to know who your neighbors are.”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:18] — Introduction to retail crime narratives and lobbying
• [05:00] — CORCA’s scope and Homeland Security involvement
• [07:30] — ICE’s expanded access to retail data explained
• [10:45] — Real-world examples of data-sharing between stores and law enforcement
• [15:45] — Community resistance and mutual aid case studies
• [17:25] — DA Laura Conover on CORCA and Lake and Riley Act impacts
• [20:29] — Case study: Jessica Corrales Duarte
• [23:09] — Risks of expanded surveillance and technological failures
• [25:45] — Legal definition of “moral turpitude” and immigration law explained
• [29:26] — Discussion of the state's power and violence
• [30:22] — Building community as the real solution

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Tone & Final Takeaway

The episode maintains a skeptical, urgent tone—critical of both the rhetoric and real-world impact of the new legislation, but hopeful in its advocacy for community solutions. The hosts and guests caution that, amid bipartisan complacency, it is up to ordinary people—neighbors, local groups, mutual aid networks—to protect each other from the overlap of profit-driven surveillance, aggressive policing, and a federal crackdown on immigrants.

Final Message:
“Go find your co-op grocery store, get to know your neighbors’ faces before ICE gets to know your face at the grocery store.” (31:54)

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Transcript

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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here and our Retail Thunderdome. I'm Kevin Foster and today we're continuing our dive into organized retail crime. In the last episode, I went over the multi year propaganda campaign waged by the retail lobby to make organized retail CR time into a national crisis requiring stricter policing and penalties and investment from all levels of government. I recommend listening to that episode before this one, but in short, huge swaths of politicians bought right in, spending hundreds of millions at the behest of retail giants. Despite a serious lack of evidence, I also touched on the advancements in surveillance at retail stores. Whether we see a rollout of AI powered robots in the coming years may not matter so much, as many industry leaders are already implementing facial recogn technology and creating watch lists under the guise of loss prevention. And this surveillance dragnet is a key element in the rising concern around the Combating Organized Retail Crime act, or corca, which passed the House of Representatives in May with resounding bipartisan support. In all likelihood, CORKA will be signed into law, and today's episode is about why that is very bad and how it's going to impact the American public, notably immigrants. Let's get right into it. The Combating Organized Retail Crime act has remained in circulation for years, but to get it over the finish line, the retail lobby and supporters of the legislation ultimately found a new cargo theft. And this is how they've managed to turn a manufactured retail theft story into a national security problem that demands intervention by the Department of Homeland Security. In a nutshell, the cargo theft narrative has striking similarities to organized retail crime. The American Transportation Research Institute says there's between $1.8 billion and $6.5 billion in yearly losses because of cargo theft, but this includes indirect costs, a measure of costs across the entire supply chain in terms of the actual value of goods. CargoNet, a nationally coordinated database, placed total cargo theft losses at 725 million across the US and Canada in 2025. Despite total physical losses being under a billion dollars, there have been more attempts to dramatically inflate the numbers. Phil Brink, the head of fraud, media and education at Freightways, a trucking, logistics and news company, estimated the total losses could actually be closer to $60 billion because of underreporting of theft. No clear evidence is provided to back up this assertion other than unnamed experts. If this sounds familiar, it's almost the exact same story as the National Retail Federation's fraudulent organized retail crime numbers, where they inflated their stats by an order of magnitude, mostly based on vibes. And while cargo theft did spike in 2023, a funny little side note is that AI integration into logistics might be a big part of the problem. Reporting in the news outlet the lever indicates that instead of modern day highway robberies, cargo theft is beginning to look more like people simply impersonating trucking companies than fooling faulty new AI logistics systems. And once they're cleared by the AI, they can essentially just pick up the cargo and roll off. So between retail crime and cargo theft, we're essentially operating under two manufactured crises. And yet here's the language in the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act. Organized theft groups impact the national security of the United States through financing transnational criminal activity and providing profit and proceeds supporting larger criminal goals of the criminal organizations. In other words, retail crime is now a national security threat and it demands the influence of Homeland Security and ice. Specifically, Corka calls for the establishment of a coordination center to combat organized retail and supply chain crime. The DHS Secretary will establish the center and it will be run by an individual chosen by the director of ice. Fantastic. In essence, this coordination center will be the hub for federal law enforcement activity and connections between the national and local level and the public and private sector. Obviously, ICE deepening its involvement in our day to day lives is something to be concerned about. But here's where it gets really crazy. The bill states, in general, subject to the approval of the director of the center, information that would otherwise be subject to the limitation on the disclosure of confidential information set forth in section 1905 of title 18, United States Code, may be shared if such disclosure is operationally necessary. Putting the legalese aside, what this means in practice is that ICE can access confidential and proprietary data from retailers. And because operationally necessary is an extremely broad, undefined term, ICE is essentially given full discretion over what data they can collect. If anyone questions them, they'll likely just say, we need to play it safe. Because organized retail crime is a matter of national security that could finance drug and weapons trafficking harming Americans. So that retail surveillance dragnet I mentioned in part one, the AI, facial recognition, the robots, the customer profiles, they say can be leveraged to boost customer loyalty. ICE could potentially leverage that data in its immigration crackdown. Imagine a world where ICE knows who is going to which stores and when. No need for scanning license plates on the streets anymore. Now they can just look up your customer profile and head over to Walmart when you're doing your bi weekly grocery run. Given what we've seen in the past year and a half, ICE will likely try to leverage this heavily. They already have facial recognition technology like the mobile Fortify app, which according to Vanderbilt University School of Law is connected to a database of over 200 million images. The ACLU of Wisconsin states that you may already be in this database as it's connected to other databases containing federal biometric systems, passport and visa records and state driver's license photos. A depressing little side note, some of this may have been preventable. For example, in Oregon, the state police are being sued for sharing data with ice, even though they and our governor were warned by Congress members to close certain loopholes that gave ICE access to DMV records. Now, obviously, grocery stores present a significant vulnerability to maintaining our privacy due to basic human needs. Nothing is clearly stopping ICE from running face scans out of retail stores and creating a new front for their anti immigrant crackdown. And there's already a blueprint for this. The ACLU published an article in January this year about Wegmans using facial recognition and sharing data on quote, persons of interest with law enforcement on a quote case by case basis. It's unclear how or if retail stores will challenge ICE's access in any way. As of now, many have been fully on board with the organized retail theft hype train. On the other hand, on May 11 this year, a coalition of 40 civil rights organizations, including the Immigrant Defenders Law center and the national association of Criminal Defense Attorneys, sent a letter to Congress urging the House not to pass Corka, highlighting how it would massively expand DHS's role in authority in domestic law enforcement. And the issues don't end there. They also pointed out how CORCA gives DHS influence over local and state law enforcement through the ability to expand certain grant requirements. In effect, this coalition sees a pathway for DHS to push jurisdictions toward more intrusive data collection and surveillance, especially if that jurisdiction is receiving federal grants. Additionally, the coalition noted how the sunset provision for the CORCA Coordination center includes no requirement to dismantle data sharing systems, delete collected information, or reverse any entrenched surveillance practices, unquote. So these practices could very well be here to stay without some sort of intervention down the line. Good luck to us trying to get that. I think, as James put it in a conversation we had, it's like trying to convince a bunch of the HOA moms that we need to be softer on retail crime. It just doesn't really seem like it's going to happen. And unfortunately, this coalition letter largely fell on deaf ears, with only 59 Democrats and one Republican voting against Corka in the House. I've spoken with many people about this and there's often this question of like, do they know? And I'd argue it's their job to know. And this bill is pretty cut and dried power expansion for ice. It's kind of hard to tell how they wouldn't have seen this coming, especially with progressive groups warning them about it. And by now this coalition has grown to over 120 organizations urging the Senate not to pass Corka. In spite of this, in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin have teamed up to add CORKA as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization act for fiscal year 2020 2027. This would essentially just mean entrenching this into our defense policy. And if that happens, which seems somewhat likely, I suspect it's curtains and Corka is going through. I highly doubt that the Democrats are going to hold the line on the NDAA for something they clearly either don't care about or don't seem to understand. But what they might care about are the products and services that support this Pod.

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And we're back. And I'm imagining this is starting to sound pretty frightening. And it is. To cool the temperature a bit, it's important to consider ICE's capacity for enforcement. They've had ways of accessing various surveillance tools for quite some time now. To some extent, they likely could have done some of this stuff with flock cameras or other automated license plate readers. But I think the threat in retail comes more from the pre existing infrastructure and the fact that this bill seems to give ICE sweeping access to confidential and proprietary information. Still, there are strategies for resisting this. I won't lie. Many of them are time intensive and require consistent community effort. But that's the world we're in. For example, in Hillsborough, Oregon, just west of Portland, local mutual aid groups began delivering groceries to immigrant families who were afraid to go outside in the middle of Operation Black Rose, which was the massive ICE surge last fall and winter in Los Angeles. Last summer, similar groups set up community defense corners outside Home Depot parking lots in an attempt to protect day laborers from ICE raids. These usually manifested as just pop up tents with community members. Water and snacks certainly didn't stop everything, but I know one group in Pasadena that was allegedly the last Home Depot in LA to be raided, and they had a consistent community effort for months. In terms of shopping, avoiding loyalty programs may end up being necessary, as this is one of the ways that we hand over a lot of our data to stores, but shopping locally or at stores that collect less data will probably be the best bet. So Korka clearly has a number of ways that it could be abused by ice. But to get the full extent of what we're dealing with, I got in contact with Laura Conover, who is the district Attorney in Pima County, Arizona, which contains Tucson and Borders, the Mexican state of sonora. Contrary to D.A. steffen featured in the first episode, Conover has actually been an outspoken opponent of Corka. In particular, she has tied Corka to the Lake and Riley act, saying Congress is just compounding mistakes it already made. The Lake and Riley act became law on January 29, 2025, passing Congress again with a substantial amount of bipartisan support greater than 60% in both chambers. It's a particularly abhorrent piece of legislation, as it requires DHS to detain certain non US Nationals who have been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, shoplifting, assault of a law enforcement officer, or any crime that results in death or serious bodily injury to another person. Notice how it says arrested, not charged, not convicted, but simply detained for one of the crimes listed, even if the individual didn't actually do anything wrong. The law also allows states to sue the federal government for alleged failures in immigration enforcement, meaning the federal government can effectively be held liable for a number of things, such as if an undocumented immigrant causes harm to state residents, including financial harm greater than $100. It's tough to say the extent to which this could be applied, but the through line between this and Korka is pretty clear. ICE could monitor retail locations for thefts and shoplifting through Korka. Then they're essentially liable if they don't seek to detain someone who has stolen more than a hundred dollars worth of merchandise. Conover has specific examples of the ways in which the Lake and Riley act is burdening local jurisdictions, destroying due process Protections and ultimately how Corka will very likely make this worse. For example, it was Conover's job to prosecute the case of Jessica Corrales Duarte, who entered the US when she was two years old with her mother, who had fled domestic abuse in Mexico and obtained legal status through the Violence Against Women Act. Corales Duarte became a DACA recipient and she's now 32 or 33 based on the articles that I read, and she has two children. But in the past year, she was arrested and charged with shoplifting and theft, and her DACA status has been terminated. She allegedly stole up to $5,700 in perfume from an Ulta Beauty location over three days, which put her over the felony theft threshold, though this number is disputed by her defense. She had no prior criminal record, and Conover said based on a taped confession, she likely would have qualified for a program where she could pay restitution and get back on her feet. Then ICE came in. They detained Coralias Duarte as she was leaving her home for her waitressing job. The ensuing months were a disaster. ICE held her at the Eloi Detention center about an hour from Tucson and blocked her from attending many of the court dates for her shoplifting case, according to an article in the Tucson Spotlight. Here's DA Conover on the situation.

[District Attorney Laura Conover]

So, for example, in our case, the result was just defendants disappearing into federal custody and before any normal process. So you've got a victim who's now totally out of luck for any kind of restoration, be that through probation or through restitution, which is important, you know, so victims rights are violated. The defendant obviously like, gets no due process. You know, in our experience, they hardly had any contact with their attorney, and their attorney was just rendered totally ineffective in the local court. So it confounds the entire normal criminal justice process. It's like the opposite of collaboration.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

So not only are Corrales Duarte's rights violated on multiple levels, but it also actually hurts the property owner because they won't receive restitution if someone is deported. It's not clear whether Corrales Duarte was involved in some sort of organized retail theft operation, but I want to stress again that the people in such a situation who actually do the stealing, commonly referred to as boosters, are often poor, homeless, or struggling in some way themselves. Many of you probably already know this, but undocumented people commit less crime overall than American citizens. An analysis by the National Institute of Justice using data from Texas between 2012 and 2018 found that undocumented immigrants had offending rates less than half of that of US born citizens. This is in spite of the fact that the US makes it much harder for undocumented people to obtain good paying jobs which can drive people into poverty and therefore crime. And for all of this, Conover informed me that Corales Duarte appears to be in process for deportation away from her children. There are just more effective and humane ways to deal with this, like the diversion programs mentioned, which don't need to involve the federal government, but instead we're just giving more power to ice.

[District Attorney Laura Conover]

With Lake and Riley and with Corca, you're talking about such a street level local issue where we have local police and prosecutors whose entire purpose is to prosecute local crime and to just give some random federal agency authority over that sweeping new authority of that just doesn't make any sense operationally. Not to mention the particular agency is one in which there's bipartisan concern about how recklessly they're being managed.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

On the note of recklessness, with the expansion of ISIS surveillance network comes greater concern over warrantless enforcement, constitutional violations and technological mistakes. The podcast Reveal reported a case of ICE scanning the face of a 23 year old US citizen purely on suspicion. And according to Innovation Law Lab, the same seems to have happened to a woman in Oregon where ICE used a Palantir developed platform called Elite, which without a warrant, essentially geofences an area and creates targets with a quote immigration nexus. In this case, the mobile Fordify app returned two different incorrect names and images for the same woman. Still, ICE has told lawmakers it's a definitive measure of immigration status that effectively supersedes other evidence of citizenship, such as a birth certificate. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has also reported that facial recognition tech is less accurate on women than men, black people, and other individuals with darker skin. This all gets much worse when you're not in a controlled environment where you can get a well lit straight on shot of someone's face with no obstruction. Certainly something that isn't going to happen under the floodlights of a grocery store entryway. So again, I can't really say to what extent ICE will actually integrate all of these technologies or what capacity they'll have for enforcement. But it seems like the worst case scenario could be a warrantless surveillance frenzy where they couldn't care less if they're detaining the right people. I say the right people as in the individuals that they're actually targeting. And I don't actually believe there is a right person to be detained. It's all bullshit, but as Corca also calls for local and federal collaboration, cops could very easily worsen this problem and ICE can leverage the Lake and Riley act to ramp up deportations. It's not good, but anyways, here's some ad. And we're back. To round out this two parter, I'd like to connect some of the dots from the first episode to Korka. To do so, I've chatted with James about a concept known as moral turpitude. Moral turpitude is a vaguely defined concept and there's lots of nebulous legal language surrounding it. But in essence, it's a crime that is considered morally offensive and it's important to immigration law. Notably, included in this definition is larceny or theft. Any conviction for one of these crimes can render an immigrant either inadmissible or deportable. Here's some of the conversation that James and I had.

[James (Legal Expert)]

Inadmissibility could be important for someone who is inside the United States. Let's say they, they call it iwi, entered without inspection. That means coming into the United States, not through a port of entry. Right. Let's say they went over the wall, under the wall, around the wall, through the river, through the desert, through the mountains. Right. There are many ways that people could enter without inspection. They could then be found inadmissible long after entering the United States because they hadn't been admitted. Right. They just came in. Just imagine, like you want to go to Disneyland. It's prohibitively expensive, so you climb over the fence. You were not admitted to Disneyland. Right. So if Disneyland found you, they would kick you out. The issue here. Let's say if someone has been in the United States for a number of years, but they are undocumented, if they are found guilty of a crime, including moral turpitude, or convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude, and the offence carries a maximum sentence of one year or more, and the person committed the offence within five years after the date of admission, they are then deportable. Now, if they eat, if they entered with that inspection, there are other reasons they could be deportable, right? Yeah, but let's say somebody has a visa. The same is true with inadmissibility, right? So we recently had a Supreme Court ruling about admissibility with regards to permanent residents, which kind of brings them closer in line to visa holders. But admissibility doesn't just mean them giving you the visa. It could also, for example, impact you if you went somewhere else and returned to the United States. Right? So a crime involving moral turpitude could then render you inadmissible. So you could be detained or not admitted to the United States when you came back. It's also important, I guess, to note that some diversion programs, state diversion programs, don't count as a conviction in terms of federal immigration law if a guilty plea is not entered. So if somebody who could previously have got into a diversion program ends up not in a diversion program, in addition to Corca. Right. We have all these state sentencing enhancements that we see in California.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Right.

[James (Legal Expert)]

If that person ends up with a conviction instead of being put in a diversion program without entering a plea, that is a night and day difference in immigration terms. Right. It's black and white. One is a conviction for what is probably a crime involving moral turpitude, because larceny is a crime involving moral turpitude. And I think that's what this generally falls under. Right? Yeah. Again, not a lawyer, but like, if that is the case, one of these sentencing enhancements at a state level results in somebody now having, for federal immigration terms, a conviction of a crime involving moral turpitude. They are now inadmissible. And in a single conviction, as I said before, can make a non citizen deportable if it has a possible sentence for a year or more, which these sentencing enhancements make a lot more likely. Right?

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Yeah.

[James (Legal Expert)]

And good luck, I guess, trying to find some way of getting that conviction overturned or like, you know, now you're fighting against all this lobbying that retailers are doing.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Right.

[James (Legal Expert)]

And all this propaganda that has been put out there that is going to make it harder and harder for people to avoid those convictions in the first place and then to get them overturned.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Yeah. I don't want to get like too doom and gloom about it, but like, do you worry that there's just a combination of factors here that could massively worsen things with the level.

[James (Legal Expert)]

Yeah, yeah. Like every time we make a new law, we're giving a new power to the state. Right. And every single law is backed up by violence. Doesn't matter if it's a parking ticket or murder. Right. The state can lock you up, beat you up or shoot you up. That is the basis on which all laws rest.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Right.

[James (Legal Expert)]

So you don't pay a parking ticket, then you don't go to court. Eventually someone's going to turn up at your door and it's going to be a person with a gun.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Right.

[James (Legal Expert)]

That is the structure on which the state exists. To use the, the crass for barian definition of the state, I guess. And this is a big One, right. We are handing a bunch of tools here to an entity which is tearing families apart, which is ripping children from parents, which is taking grandmothers away from their grandchildren, Right?

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Yeah. I mean, what do you. Maybe this isn't for the episode, but like, what do you think people should do?

[James (Legal Expert)]

Yeah, like the answer to this is the same as the answer to everything. It's stronger communities. Like, people steal things because they need to meet their material needs. I'm sure some people also enjoy stealing stuff, right? That's the thing that exists. But a vast majority of theft is happening because people are not meeting their material needs. We need to work out a way to meet each other's material needs. And like I was in Minneapolis in January, right? Yeah, Very hard for me to be hungry in Minneapolis in January. Like, I'm vegan, I'm annoying to feed, right. But people would constantly bring me fucking food and hot tea and like that's not their be all end all, but gets us a long way there. Like if your neighbors aren't hungry. And I guess to know if your neighbors are hungry, you have to know who your neighbors are, right? So like start by knocking on someone's door. You know, start by, hey, your truck's not working. Let's work it out. I bet I can find a YouTube video we can watch. And if you have a bunch of sockets, let's see if we can fix it.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

So I know the ending of this is sort of bleak, but I just want to be honest with you about the possibilities if ICE is to take Corka as far as they can. As Da Conover told me, you give them an inch and they take a mile, then this will get very bad. Surveillance capitalism isn't going to draw a line at immigrants, but that doesn't really matter either way. Clearly the Democratic party, given their votes support, is not going to stop this. As James said, it's going to come down to community. So go find your co op grocery store, get to know your neighbors faces before ICE gets to know your face at the grocery store. Thanks for listening.

[Nancy Glass]

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