Transcript
David Pakman (0:00)
Foreign welcome, everybody. It seems every day the line is being pushed further and we now have reports of ICE detaining US citizens for hours as they attempt to reenter the United States. We were told it would just be the criminal illegals, that any US Citizen had nothing to worry about, that this was about safety and not about profiling. But this week a US citizen was detained by Customs and Border Protection after coming back from a weekend trip in Canada, a trip I've done many times as a naturalized American citizen. The individual to whom this happened is essentially no different than me. This is Bakira Tala, real estate attorney from New Hampshire, has lived in the United states for nearly four decades, has been a naturalized American citizen for over 10 years, and after crossing the Vermont border with his wife, maybe at the exact same crossing that I've done 30 or so times when coming back from Montreal, he was pulled aside by CBP agents, told to get out of the car, and when he hesitated for clarification, an agent reached for his gun. Atala complied, but was handcuffed, wrist twisted, dragged away. While his wife watched from the car. He asked, why am I being detained? The response is we don't know. It's. The government agents demanded access to his phone and to his email. He invoked attorney client privilege as a practicing lawyer. They pressured him into signing a statement allowing them to search through it. And anyway, under duress, he gave in. And five hours later he and his wife were released. No charges were filed, no explanation was given, just disbelief and the trauma of such an event. Now, this is not an isolated incident. Last month we learned about ICE detaining Gen Z Machado, another naturalized US citizen and by the way, one that actually supports, or it at least did support, Donald Trump. We learned of a student with a green card tackled in front of his pregnant wife and now a decade long citizen coming back from Canada detained and interrogated for hours. So we're in a new phase. The line keeps pushing forward. Only criminal illegals. Well, maybe it's anybody who's undocumented. Well, maybe it's people here with visas. Maybe it's permanent residence. Maybe it's a naturalized American citizen, just like me. So we're now in a phase where apparently not even citizenship protects you. First it was undocumented immigrants and green card holders and then now we are pushing the line further and further and of course everybody's insisting that all of this stuff is being done by the book. Now here is what Bichira Tala's sister, who's an immigration attorney said it is not about immigrants. It's coming to us Americans and it's going to go after all of us. This is what the Trump deportation machine looks like. Even if not everybody being encountered is even subject to deportation legally. When a citizen with a US Passport, no criminal record, legal credentials can be treated like this at the border, we are beyond the is this going too far Phase. It's happening right now. And so for everybody, you know, I was on with the Don with Don Lemon yesterday alongside Brian Tyler Cohen and Cenk Uygur, and our consensus was this has already gone far enough. Where now is the red alert? Now is the five alarm fire. Serious legal questions, of course, about what happened to attala. Customs and Border Protection, of course, documents does have broader authority at border crossings. That's what they do. It includes the ability to do a secondary screening. There are constitutional limits, especially when it comes to American citizens. You know, we sort of encountered this to a degree during the COVID era, because remember, in the COVID era, with all of the travel restrictions as applied to citizens coming back to the United States, at the end of the day, what was determined was that the United States cannot block a citizen from coming home. And so all of the testing guidelines and all of the different stuff that the right wingers were furious about, the right wingers ultimately came down on the side of, you really can't keep an American citizen out of the United States. You can't reject their reentry to the United States. If they show up and they haven't done the COVID test, you've got to let them back in. That's how it applied then. But now a different standard being applied. Well, I don't know. Maybe the five hours of questioning is okay. Maybe the allowing search of the phone under duress is ok. So this should be setting alarm bells off in every courtroom in the country. At minimum, we have a violation of attorney client confidentiality. At worse, you know, it's a case study in rights being trampled in real time. Now, later, CBP has really kind of focused in on this. Attala consented to the search of his phone. We've talked about this before. Consent given under duress after being handcuffed and threatened. I don't know that that's really consent in any meaningful legal sense. And courts have long recognized that these coercive environments can invalidate consent in exactly this sort of situation. But it keeps happening. Very little oversight, almost no consequences. Finally, we have to talk about the biggest chilling effect that can't be ignored. When the line moves to naturalized citizens searched, detained, humiliated, intimidated at the border, the message is that your status doesn't protect you. I have the same status as Atala. And then, of course, the next phase is, damn. Maybe Trump is serious about sending American citizens, naturalized or natural born, to other countries. And the implications go well beyond immigration enforcement. This discourages legal residents and new citizens from exercising their rights. It sows fear. It tells people, don't ask questions, don't speak up, don't push back. So that is where we are now. American citizen detained for hours and humiliated. Let's next go to a case of mistaken identity. But does mistaken identity even matter? ICE just smashed the window of a car, dragged a man out, his wife screaming, his son watching, and they had the wrong guy. This happened in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Video, which we will look at, shows ICE agents surrounding a car, demanding the man inside get out. And when he doesn't, an agent grabs an ax, smashes the window, glass everywhere, panic. And by the way, they got the wrong guy. We'll talk about whether that is the key part of this. Take a look at this. The agent's saying, I only want to talk. And the, the individual is saying, only with my lawyer asking whether there's a warran. All right, so this is, this is the lead up that ultimately led to the smashing of the glass that we saw at the beginning of the video. So here's what's going on. The man is 29 year old asylum seeker Juan Francisco Mendez. He's from Guatemala, no criminal record. His wife and son are already protected under asylum. As a reminder, asylum is legal status. It is not permanent, but it is legal status. The individual was in the final steps of his asylum process and his lawyer says that ICE was actually looking for someone else entirely. A man named Antonio who lived in the same building. Wrong guy, different person, but they didn't care. Kwon explains he's not Antonio. He says he's waiting on his lawyer. ICE doesn't wait. They bring out the ax, smash the window and arrest him anyway. And now he is sitting in a detention center in Dover, New Hampshire. No charges, no explanation. And of course, his wife is asking, when is he coming home? His son is saying, when is he coming home? And the real kicker here is, even if it had been the right guy, would this have been ok? Would smashing a car window in front of a child and dragging someone out still be acceptable when they are invoking their right to counsel? This takes us a couple of steps back to something we've been talking about. Now for weeks. If an individual story is sympathetic or unsympathetic, does that change the legal requirement to provide due process? And we're going to deal with this later in the case of Abrego Garcia, where you've got Tom Homan and Pam Bondi and others saying even if he came back from El Salvador, he would immediately be deported again. And of course that's a lie. The truth is if he came back from El Salvador, he would be subject to deportation pending the results of a hearing. That's called due process. I'm the first to tell you, if he comes back and gets his hearing, gets his day in court, and it is then indicated that he should be deported, that is due process. We may like it or not, we may find his particular story sympathetic or not, but it's due process. And the problem here is that due process is being ignored. I've caught myself many times on the show over the last week or so saying the law guarantees, the constitution guarantees. What does it mean to guarantee something if there is no means of enforcement, no, no means of ensuring that someone is actually provided what they are entitled to? And that's where we find ourselves at this point in time. Now after the break, we are going to talk about a judge that is at least trying to do what he can to ensure that due process is provided to people. We are going to hear and see from an Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and from a White House press secretary, Caroline Levitt, who cannot or will not stop lying about every aspect of what's going on while claiming to be the most moral and the most law abiding. And then we are also going to see in the midst of this, the economic chaos that is increasingly impossible to support. I will remind you, I would love it for you to get on my newsletter if the clampdown happens. The only platform on which we own our data and we own our list is our newsletter. It'll be how you can get a hold of me and I can get a hold of you no matter what happens on all the algorithmically based platforms. 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