Radley Balko (4:33)

Thanks for having me on.

Ezra Klein (4:34)

So I want to start here by following the money a bit. The Atlantic reported that in Donald Trump's 2026 budget, you had the FBI seeing a big budget cut. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a big cut. The Drug Enforcement Administration, again, big cut. At the same time, they're passing bills to triple the budget of ICE to all in add $170 billion to immigration enforcement. What's behind this pattern of the big crime agencies seeing their budgets cut and immigration enforcement entering a kind of budgetary expansion we have never seen before.

Radley Balko (5:13)

I think it's just a continuation of the hollowing out of institutions that we've seen over the last six months. ICE and Customs and Border Protection have long been the most rogue, kind of renegade and certainly pro Trump police agencies in the federal government. So I think Trump sees those two as the most loyal to him. Also, obviously, the mass deportations are going to ensure that those two agencies remain relevant throughout his administration. The FBI has a long and proud history and culture. There are a lot of stains on that history and culture, but it is an institution that has prided itself on its independence. Same with the atf, which has often bucked Republican administrations. And I've certainly had my problems with the DEA over the years, but they also there is a separate sort of culture and sense of independence there. So I think this is an effort to be build up the two federal police agencies that Trump sees as most loyal and deferential to him.

Ezra Klein (6:19)

It's really big. I mean, one quote that I came across while I was preparing for this episode from the journalist Caitlin Dickerson just I don't know, you know, these things. And then you realize you don't really know them, you're not tracking their scale, she writes. It makes immigration enforcement's budget, quote, larger than the annual military budget of every country in the world except the United States and China. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, just one component of the Department of Homeland Security, is getting more money than any other law enforcement agency in America. We've already seen pretty big changes in how ICE is acting. We've seen pretty big changes around how border police are acting. You've tracked internal policing for a long time. What is different about what we've seen over the past, you know, months of the Trump administration versus what we were seeing from them, say, five years ago?

Radley Balko (7:10)

What we're seeing now are the tactics and operations and policies that over the last 20 years, I refrained or tried to restrain myself from warning about because it would sound too unhinged. You know, I've warned for a long time about police agencies becoming too militarized, you know, too aggressive, too sort of us versus them, you know, militarized, both in the sense of the equipment that they use, but also in the mentality that they bring to the job. But it was always in response to a real threat, right? So it happened during the crack epidemic, right, which killed a lot of people, which actually existed. It happened again after September 11, where you had these attacks on American soil. And so Homeland Security started equipping police departments across the country with this military style police gear. What we're seeing right now is not. It's in response to a manufactured crisis, right? I mean, yes, crime is real. Yes, crime is higher in D.C. than in other cities, but there is crisis in D.C. right. As we've all documented, crime is down pretty significantly there. Los Angeles, there were a few incidents of violence or more property destruction during the original protests against immigration enforcement, but it wasn't anything different than you see in a big city at any given time, particularly during the summer. So what we're seeing is this massive sort of increase in aggressiveness and brutality in response to a crisis that is completely of Trump's own making. So what we're seeing is not a good faith effort to go after the worst of the worst, which, if you look at polling overwhelmingly, that's what people wanted. They wanted them to go after people who had violent criminal histories and criminal records. But you can't hit the figures that they wanted by just targeting the dangerous people, because dangerous people don't make themselves available to ice. They hide. It's a hell of a lot easier just to send a couple of ICE agents to a courthouse and arrest people as they show up, as they're supposed to be doing for their hearings. And so that's what we're seeing. It's a lot easier to go to Home Depot and just massively, racially profile and arrest anybody you see and then sort through the paperwork later. It's a lot easier, as we saw here in Nashville, to just pull over every driver who looks Latino, and if they can prove their citizenship, you let them go, or if they're white, you let them go. And if they can't, you detain and arrest them and send them through the process.

Ezra Klein (9:34)

There's been a lot of reporting on the way. Stephen Miller has gone into meetings with the head of ICE and other agencies and just lashed into them for not deporting enough people. They want to get deportation numbers up around a million, which the expectation is. That's very, very difficult to do without creating a lot of tearing into the social fabric. But there has been a sense and a fair amount of internal reporting, that one of the things happening here is the heads of these operations are just getting hamm by top officials in the Trump administration for not having their numbers up, demanding they hit a quota.

Radley Balko (10:11)

Yeah, that's my understanding of what's happening. Also, in fact, in la, the raids on Home Depot parking lots came after, you know, a rant by Stephen Miller. That's kind of how they interpreted what he wanted done. You know, Stephen Miller is a menace. He's been very clear about what his intentions are. He's been very clear that he does not believe the United States should be a place that takes in refugees from other countries. He's been very clear that he thinks the United States should be a primarily Western culture country. We've read investigative journalism about his influence by white supremacists. He has not pretended to hide who he is. And the fact that the personnel numbers that they've set out for ICE in order to meet the mass deportation figures, the goals that they've set, they're going to have to hire a lot of people. So they're going to have to lower standards, which they're already doing, but also they're going to have to hire the kind of people who are going to be looking at these videos that are coming out of ice, terrorizing families, arresting children, pulling grandmothers out of their homes. They're going to be hiring people who look at those videos and say, you know what? That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do for a living. Right. But then we're also seeing these pretty explicit appeals to white supremacy and white culture. I mean, there's. I think one of the social media posts they had said something about, you know, defend your culture, join ice.

Ezra Klein (11:38)

Is that the one with, like, the painting of, like, a very Western cowboy family, like, cradling this extremely white baby?

Radley Balko (11:47)

Right.

Ezra Klein (11:48)

The two, the caption and the photo really, or illustration really told a tale, I think, even if you're not out there looking for dog whistles.

Radley Balko (11:57)

Right. And there's another one of sort of white settlers chasing Native Americans off the land and a kind of a white angel sort of hovering over the landscape, which history books actually teach as sort of an embodiment of, like, the worst excesses of Western expansionism. So it's, you know, they're embracing these ideas that we've always looked at as kind of a regrettable part of our history. And then there was another one where they explicitly referred to a text, a book that was written by an unapologetic white supremacist. And you kind of have to know that name and that book to get that. But that's the people. They're appealing to you, right? Why do you make that reference if it's going to be opaque to most people? You're appealing to people who know what the reference is. So anybody who's left in these agencies who still takes a institutional view of policing, the idea that police should be accountable, that they should serve these communities and not occupy them, they're going to be overwhelmed by these new people. So I think whatever culture of community service was left in either of these agencies is pretty quickly going to be overwhelmed as these new hires start to take effect. The other thing we're seeing is obviously the masks. There's an anecdote I've told a lot over the years of the neoconservative writer Michael Ledeen, who I think was in 2007, 2008, was one of the kind of neoconservatives who were agitating for war with Iran. There were a series of photos that came out of Tehran of a drug raid in Tehran, cocaine raid. And all the officers in the raid were wearing masks. And Ledeen wrote at the time that when the agents of the government hide their faces, it speaks volumes about the relationship between the government and the people. Right. And he was saying this, that this is a sign of a totalitarian state. And now it's just routine. I mean, we're seeing this all over the country. So, you know, I think we're in a pretty terrifying spiral Right now. And I've tried to, over the course of my career, be sort of level headed and refrain from expressing things in too dire of terms. But I think we're vastly. We have entered kind of the worst case scenario and it's hard to see how we get out of it.

Ezra Klein (14:15)

What is the worst case scenario?

Radley Balko (14:17)

I think the worst case scenario is that Trump sends active duty military troops into any city that displeases him. Any city where there's protests. I mean, during his first administration, we know that he wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act. He wanted to send active duty military in to put down the George Floyd protests. And he openly floated the idea of just shooting them, just shooting the protesters. To be fair, he said shooting them in the knee. So I guess it's not as bad as it could be. But what I think we're seeing right now is Trump is attempting to build his own paramilitary force. They want people whose first and ultimate sort of loyalty in this job is going to be to the President. And I'm a journalist, not a historian, but I'm a student of history. And there aren't very many countries in which the figurative, the political head of the country assembled his own personal paramilitary force that was loyal only to him where things turned out well. So that's, I think, where we are right now.

Ezra Klein (15:18)

Let me try to take their perspective on this for a moment at least their stated perspective. You talked about this as a manufactured crisis. DC's crime rates, we can talk about those in a minute. I agree. That's manufactured, at least for the purposes of their takeover of DC. But Donald Trump ran for president in 2024, saying to the country that we have seen record illegal immigration into this country. That was true, actually, that America is buckling under the weight of all these illegal immigrants. That's arguable. Not my view, but it's their view. And he promised the country mass deportations. And he said it aloud and he said it clearly and he said it repeatedly, and he won the election. And we're here talking about paramilitaries, but what they're doing is simply following through, in their view on what the country voted for. Mass deportation is going to be ugly. They're difficult, they're violent. They require not just shutting down the border, but ejecting the people already here. That's going to require more ICE agents, it's going to require confrontations. But that this is not something outside the boundaries of what should happen after an election. This is exactly what they ran on. And now they're just following through as they told us they would.

Radley Balko (16:37)

Yeah. I think my response to that would be that we have the Bill of Rights for a reason. You can't vote away basic constitutional rights. They aren't subject to the whims of a majority. And what we're seeing is suspensions of due process for people who are here and undocumented. We're seeing people being arrested when they show up for their hearings, when they're abiding by the law doing what they're supposed to be doing. We've seen the Trump administration revoke protected status for refugees from countries who are fleeing violence, political persecution, famine, natural disasters all over the world. We're seeing the administration has revoked that protected status for them and is now detaining and moving to deport them. These are people who came here legally, who were invited here, in fact. So they're firing immigration judges who aren't ruling the way they want them to rule. They are freely admitting that they're racially profiling. So I guess my bottom line is that we don't. The government is not allowed to start violating our basic constitutional rights just because people voted for that in an election or thought they were voting for that.

Ezra Klein (17:45)

I found it a little shocking to watch them sending masked agents to courthouses where immigrants are showing up and participating in the system exactly as the system has asked them to participate. Right. These are clearly not people hiding. They are walking into the courthouse, even knowing that in recent weeks, in recent months, people have been yanked out of courthouses and they're being arrested before they talk to a judge. They're being arrested during their process. So what exactly is the policy here? I mean, you are allowed to go to a hearing and claim asylum. That's the legal pathway. Have they decided they don't qualify for asylum or they no longer get hearings? I mean, beneath what they're doing, what is the process they are asserting should exist?

Radley Balko (18:37)

Yeah. So this gets kind of into the weeds of immigration law. And I'm going to tell you my understanding of it with the caveat that I'm not a lawyer. But as I understand it, these are people who, during the Biden administration, went through the proper channels to request asylum, whether it was through the app that you could use, or in some cases, people who just crossed the border and immediately turned themselves in and said, I'm requesting asylum. And so they were sort of entered into the asylum process. And so part of that means you get released because we can't hold everyone who's requesting asylum. We can't Detain all of them, but they're released on the condition that they show up for these hearings as their case progresses. So what's happening is that these people are showing up for their asylum hearings. The government is saying at these asylum hearings, we're going to dismiss the government's case against this person. Right. So at that point, the person is no longer someone who went through the proper channels to legally request asylum. At that point, they are now just someone who is undocumented and is here without authorization. And so now ICE is legally permitted to detain them and sweep them up because they're no longer in the asylum process. Now, as I understand it, that is legally dubious to say the least, and it's being challenged in federal court. But it's a way for them to just kind of say, it's a way for them to apprehend these people, and it's a way for them to boost their deportation figures.

Ezra Klein (20:05)

I mean, among other things, it seems like it would make a lot of immigrants go to ground. If that's what you get for showing up, why show up?

Radley Balko (20:12)

Yeah, I mean, it's a very similar thing. I mean, this really scary thing we just saw where the IRS is now sharing its taxpayer data with ice. One of the big arguments you always hear on the right is that undocumented people are, you know, receiving government benefits and not paying taxes. And that's not true. They do pay taxes. They pay all the payroll taxes. And so by going after them to the irs, you're punishing the people who are paying taxes, who are giving back, and you're going to encourage people now to find ways to avoid that. You know, it is what they're doing is they're prioritizing sort of the cruelty. They want the images, they want the video, they want the social media hits they want to project to their hardest core supporters. They want to fulfill that kind of thirst and glee for seeing cruelty done to people that they think are, as Trump himself put it, less than human. People who poison the blood of the country.

Ezra Klein (21:09)

Well, it seems to me they want to inspire fear. There have been all these videos of people asking ICE agents, what's your badge number? What authority are you here under? And in many cases, these people are masked up. What is more frightening to a public than masked agents of the state operating without clear authorities or oversight, who seem able to do whatever they want to you?

Radley Balko (21:34)

Yeah, and the reason they cite for the masking is that people are doxxing ICE agents. Right. Publishing their names. That's not illegal. There's no crime against that. There's no crime against publishing the names of law enforcement officers, particularly those who are doing this sort of aggressive policing. And they keep pointing to. The number keeps growing. I think the last I saw a 400% increase in assaults on ICE officers. And Philip Bump and some other journalists have broken that down. And it's from, I can't remember the exact figures, but it's from a two digit figure to maybe a three digit figure. And when you consider the number of sort of altercations and encounters between ICE agents and residents, it's actually seems pretty low.

Ezra Klein (22:21)

I understand the masks is a tool of fear. Police get attacked, police can fear being doxxed, but they show up in their uniforms and looking in a certain way because they're meant to project authority. But they're also meant to seem like part of the community. People you could talk to, people you could go up and ask a question of, people who are there serving you. But the policy is not just cruelty, the policy is fear.

Radley Balko (22:46)

Yeah. And part of, I think projecting fear is sort of flaunting your unaccountability. Right. That you're above the law. I mean, one of the first things Trump said when he sent the national guard into D.C. was he specifically told him when he takes over the D.C. police Department, police officers will be able to do, quote, whatever the hell they want. Federal agents are almost completely immune from civil liability. There is a case called Bivens from the early 1970s where the court created a way for people to sue federal agents for violating their constitutional rights. And in 2022, the current court basically all but revoked that ruling. I mean, all but completely overturned it. And Gorsuch, in fact, in a concurring opinion, said we might as well admit what we're doing here, which is we're obliterating Bivens. So there's no civil way to hold federal agents accountable for violating people's rights. In these cases there is. You know, in theory they could be held criminally accountable, but that would require Trump's Justice Department to bring charges against them. We know that's not going to happen. So there's no criminal liability, there's no civil liability. So what's left? I mean, the only way that you can sort of hold these agents accountable in any way for the displays of sort of abuse and cruelty that we're seeing is sort of social appropriate or social shaming. Right. And by wearing masks, they're removing that last sort of remaining bit of accountability. SAM.

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Ezra Klein (26:23)

Tell me about another piece of the institutional attack, which is the attack on people who work with immigrants. You had a newsletter just about a lawyer who contacted you who had been asked to give some pro bono advice to some immigrants who were facing deportation. And what happened to him? Can you tell that story? But also then what you understand happening on the more macro level?

Radley Balko (26:49)

Yeah, so what happened to this lawyer is that he doesn't work in immigration law. He did real estate type law, I think title defense or title insurance, but he walked into a gas station, he walked into regular where he knew the people who worked there and he had previously, I think, given some advice to an immigrant family and they said, well, there's this other family where the father was recently detained on a workplace raid and they're worried and could you just stop by, give them some basic advice? And so he did that. I don't have my story in front of me, so I'm not sure about the exact timeline, but I think it was a couple days later, he said he was working at home and he was on his works through a vpn, and the VPN went down.

Ezra Klein (27:35)

It's a way of accessing the Internet.

Radley Balko (27:36)

Yeah, it's a way of sort of anonymizing yourself when you're out on the Internet. And his VPN went down, and then he got a knock on the door, and he went and opened the door, and he saw two people who identified themselves as law enforcement, but wouldn't say which agency, wouldn't give them their names, wouldn't give them their badge numbers. And so he basically asked them what it was about, and they asked if he had recently given some advice to undocumented people. And at that point, he said he wanted to talk to a lawyer, he wasn't going to talk to them anymore, and shut the door. It's a disturbing story because, you know, you've got ICE agents, presumably. Ice. I guess it could be any federal or state agency. This was in Texas, coming to someone's private home. Clearly, that meant they had to look him up, you know, look up his address. He had a door camera. Right. And so, you know, presumably they saw that and decided they didn't want to be on camera, and so they shut down the WI fi. So it wouldn't work. You know, this is speculation. I guess it's possible that his wifi coincidentally went down at exactly the time that they came to his door. Seems unlikely. So he was disturbed by this, and so he told his employer about it and said he was worried about it. And the response he got was pretty cold from his own employer. Clearly, they didn't want to be dragged into some fight with the Trump administration over immigration. And he eventually lost his job specifically because he made a big deal out of this internally. So that's one incident. It's pretty disturbing, I think. But beyond that, I'm currently working on a book about public defense and public defenders, which is not going to be at all timely when it comes out, given everything that's going on. I'm not sure it's a topic anyone's going to want to read about, but part of that was I embedded myself in a lot of public defender offices over the country, and so some of the better, more equipped public defender offices have immigration defense. You're not entitled to a public defender if you're detained on immigration charges, but a lot of cities provide it anyway, just sort of out of a sense of obligation. And prior to Trump taking office, I did interviews with a lot of these attorneys. After Trump took office, none of those groups wanted to talk to me on the record anymore. They are all, like, terrified. They do not want to be on the Trump administration's radar. So Trump's going after these groups that provide aid to immigrants in a lot of different ways. One is they're shutting down all federal funding for these groups. So that's done. But they're also, Trump is targeting student loan forgiveness for public service. And judging by like a lot of his executive orders, it's pretty vague. But what it seems to be doing is saying that if you go into one of these areas of public service that we don't like, where you're defending criminals and illegal immigrants, we're not going to forgive your student loans. Well, public defense is heavily reliant on people who go into that to take advantage of student loan forgiveness. So if you take that away, these groups are not going to be able to staff themselves anymore. So they're really, they are trying to erode the ability of these immigrants to obtain representation. And I will say, if you talk to people who do this work and their studies of this, the odds of you getting a favorable outcome in an immigration hearing are significantly improved if you have an attorney than if you don't.

Ezra Klein (31:10)

We've also been going after big law firms for what kind of pro bono work they do and don't do and shifting that. And I think it was in a piece from you or someone else, Paul Weiss, which is one of the very, very big white two law firms that did a lot of pro bono work. Now, if you look on what kind of pro bono work they do, immigration has disappeared from what they say on the website. Maybe no one of these is that big of a deal. But you look at it in totality and you're trying to destroy the structures that keep some amount of legalism around this. And now you have the construction of these massive new detention centers, which it's worth saying that under US Law here, and I think this is still how they describe it, immigration detention is supposed to be non punitive. You're not being sent to prison. But they're building these things that seem like holes where it's very hard to get reached by a lawyer. Your family doesn't always know where you are. You get moved around. What do we know about that sort of buildup in camps?

Radley Balko (32:14)

I mean, on the one hand, it's something that they were very open about. I mean, Stephen Miller talked about opening tent prisons along the border, just huddling people in them. It is terrifying to me. It's not even just terrifying that they're doing it. What's terrifying to me is the rush to be on the cutting edge of this, to show your fealty and loyalty to this administration. It's things like in Indiana, the lieutenant governor giddily announced the opening of a detention center there that they recall the speedway slammer, because where the Indy 500 is going to be in speedway near the Indy 500, the governor of I believe it was Nebraska just announced the Cornhusker. Clink. Right. So we're coming up with these cute alliterative names, right, so that we can, what, sell merchandise? I mean, it's got this just.

Ezra Klein (33:05)

This is all coming from Alligator Alcatraz, I assume.

Radley Balko (33:08)

Right, Right.

Ezra Klein (33:09)

I mean, we've memeified fascism.

Radley Balko (33:12)

Yeah.

Ezra Klein (33:12)

I mean, you could say fascism always memified itself, but it's created a kind of exalting in not just cruelty, but a gleeful obliteration of any kind of process or sense of restraint or a sense that maybe we need to do these policies, but we do them with a heavy heart or we can make mistakes. So we need to make sure that those mistakes can be easily corrected and people can talk to lawyers. You come out of the. As I understand the libertarian movement, this was not like a crazily left coded set of ideas. In fact, I remember not that long ago how much the attack on the left was. There's not enough due process when you're getting canceled by the woke mob. Not enough due process in, in universities. And now you're looking at the actual state itself. Just eviscerate due process.

Radley Balko (33:58)

Yeah, you could go even further than that. I mean, I think there's a sentiment that I increasingly see on Facebook and occasionally when I just check in to see the horror show that is Twitter or X that. I mean, due process itself is woke now. Right. I mean, this is something that the idea of letting people who are here illegally have access to the courts is just beyond the pale to people. And I mean, there's no understanding that that's always the way it's been. And like you said, I mean, this is a civil violation that we are now treating. I mean, we disappeared people to a prison in El Salvador without letting them ever consult the courts. And, you know, later we find out that I think at least half of them had no priority criminal record of any kind in any country. You know, you saw during the Republican National Convention with those mass deportation signs and you saw the kind of like sneering joy, you know, that people got at the idea of those of us who were alarmed by all this would talk about. So you're okay with pulling grandmothers out of their homes and going into schools and, you know, arresting people when they're there to pick up their children and isolating the children? And it was, yes, yes, we love that idea. I mean, it was. There was absolute glee at the thought of. I don't know how we got to the point where 35, 40% of the country thinks using politics as a way to impose physical harm on people that they think are on the other side or enemies is kind of standard political discourse now, but it's a pretty scary place to be.

Ezra Klein (35:33)

I think that opens up one of the fundamental questions for a lot of us. I have this line from another show that authoritarianism is here. It's just unevenly distributed. And so one way of looking at this is that there is a profound and I would say barbaric escalation against undocumented or illegal immigrants. But it's just that it's Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and that administration, J.D. vance, have a view that America is being destroyed by an invasion, which is the word they use of illegal immigrants. And they're going to do everything they need to do to turn that back. But that's all it is, that to the extent that it's here and unevenly distributed, it's around a group of people who are not here legally. Okay. Then there is this other way of imagining it, which is that when you see movements like this, they often start with one group of undesirables and they expand out, right? Who is on the other side? Who is the danger to saving this country? And one thing it seems to me we're watching in recent months is a series of escalations. Why don't we start with what happened in Los Angeles? So you had the Trump administration deploying the National Guard, a certain number, I believe, of Marines, ultimately, over the objection of the mayor of Los Angeles, over the objection of the governor of California. That's not normal.

Radley Balko (37:00)

It's never happened before. Last time that active duty troops, not National Guard, but active duty troops were deployed in the US was during the LA riots in 1992. And that was at the invitation of the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles. So what Trump did in Los Angeles has never happened before.

Ezra Klein (37:19)

What led to Donald Trump deploying the National Guard in Los Angeles? What was his stated rationale?

Radley Balko (37:24)

The argument in court was that immigration enforcement is a federal power pretty explicitly in the Constitution, and that these protests were preventing federal immigration officers from doing their jobs. Now, there was not a lot of evidence of that. There were protests, but there's not a lot of evidence that there was violence or threats against immigration agents. There were people lining up at courthouses expressing their opposition to the way the Trump administration was carrying these out. But the court sort of took the administration's argument at face value that deploying these Guard troops was necessary to let these immigration agents do their jobs. The ninth Circuit bought that argument, Right? Well, the Trump administration argument went even farther, which was that as long as the President says that there's a need to send in the National Guard, that's not even reviewable by the courts. So the ninth Circuit at least said, no, that's not true. We can review it. It is reviewable. But in this case, we find the argument plausible, and so we're gonna let you do it. Kristine Home publicly said that the reason why the National Guard was in California was to liberate the city of Los Angeles from its socialist leadership.

Ezra Klein (38:34)

I wanna read her quote. Christy Noem, leader of the Department of Homeland Security. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city. So really, those words liberate the city from its duly elected Democratic leadership at the state and local level. When I say there's one version where you look at this and say, well, this is an immigration policy, that doesn't sound like an immigration policy, that sounds like something quite else.

Radley Balko (39:08)

And it's a sentiment that Trump has said repeatedly too. Right. That he's going to take over Blue Cities, he's going to set policy, particularly crime policy in Blue Cities. So she says that. And this isn't some low ranking administration official, this isn't some MAGA person that can be easily disavowed. This is the head of the Department of Homeland Security. Yeah.

Ezra Klein (39:28)

It's not Laura Loomer.

Radley Balko (39:29)

Right, exactly. And although Loomer at this point may have more power than Nome for. Fair enough.

Ezra Klein (39:34)

Yeah.

Radley Balko (39:35)

But also if she had spoken out of turn, if she had been sort of caught up in the moment and regretted saying things in that particular way, she could have retracted that. The administration could have distanced itself, it could have said, no, that is not our policy. But they didn't, they didn't retract it, and the ninth Circuit didn't even consider it because it wasn't part of the record. So I think this is a really important point because there's this kind of dual path that we see in authoritarian states where they justify these massive power grabs with a sort of plausible, if not persuasive, but at least kind of legally based in some sort of legal argument. That's what they argue in court. And so this dual doctrine rests on this assumption that the executive is going to be arguing in good faith.

Ezra Klein (40:24)

An assumption that the courts make.

Radley Balko (40:25)

Right. That the courts make. And so they tend to take the arguments at face value, even when there's ample evidence to the contrary, even when the administration has shown its willingness to just brazenly lie to the court in other cases. You have to show in each case that they're lying. Right. Each case, one at a time. But at some point, I think the courts have to acknowledge that what the administration is arguing in court, and to be frank, what they're arguing in court is now to the point of outrageous and often easily disprovable as well, on the ground. They're doing the absolute worst version of this policy. Right. And so what we saw in Los Angeles was there was this argument that this duel.

Ezra Klein (41:05)

I just want to note this duel just because it's so grim, this dual state theory of fascism. It's written by a German Jew who escapes Nazi Germany. It's an analysis of how Nazi Germany worked as it built to what it became.

Radley Balko (41:18)

Exactly. And it's so consistent across other authoritarian states. I mean, this is part of every authoritarian playbook. Right. One of the really damaging things I think that came out of of U.S. v. Trump, which was the decision that sort of gave Trump this broad, wide ranging immunity, is that there's no downside for Trump to trying to do these really extreme extra constitutional things. Right. There's no punishment if he goes too far. At the worst, what happens is maybe three or four years down the road, a high ranking federal court tells him he can't do that anymore. But in the meantime, he gets to do it, for the most part, a few injunctions, but they tend not to last. So there's no penalty for going too far. Right. The way our system is set up right now, the President can kind of do whatever he wants. He can take whatever power grabs he wants. And the worst thing that's going to happen is that maybe a few years later a court says, nah, you can't do that anymore.

Ezra Klein (42:21)

What did the National Guard and the Marines do while they were in Los Angeles? I mean, some are still there, I should say.

Radley Balko (42:27)

Right. Mostly they just kind of provided support for the federal agencies. I think there was maybe one instance where some active Duty Marines detained and arrested someone who was later shown to be an American citizen and just sort of wandered into the wrong area. I don't think that, if I recall correctly, I don't remember seeing a whole many incidents where either National Guard or Marines were actively using force or making arrests.

Ezra Klein (42:55)

What then happened in MacArthur Park?

Radley Balko (42:58)

You had Border Patrol, and I believe National Guard was there for support, conducted this sort of sweep of a park where, you know, in an immigrant heavy area, but where there was nothing going on. There was no reason for them to be displaying force at this park. But, yeah, they kind of marched through the park. The entire exercise was a demonstration of force. It was, you know, we're going to show, we're going to create these images showing the community how powerful we are. And, you know, that again, that is the kind of thing you see regularly in totalitarian countries. Right. We don't use the military or militarized police purely for imagery, purely for symbolic purposes. But I mean, this administration is doing it regularly. I mean, they do this to create videos that they can post on social media to scare people and to inspire, I guess, their followers.

Ezra Klein (43:55)

Everything is a spectacle, but everything too is a test or a model. So Corey Lewandowski, who is a top advisor to Christine Ohm at the Department of Homeland Security, said, I want everybody to understand the Trump administration is bringing this path across this country to make sure every sanctuary city understands that we can touch people at any place, anytime. Then there is an internal Department of Homeland Security memo that was written by Pete Hegseth's brother, who for some reason has become a significant.

Radley Balko (44:26)

Hired only on merit.

Ezra Klein (44:27)

Hired only on merit, yes. The best people. He wrote this memo, leaked and reported by the New Republic, describing the need for the military to, quote, more effectively support DHS during the next instance of LA type operations. He wrote, the US Military leadership need to feel for the first time the urgency of the homeland defense mission. So there's clearly an internal structure being built, a case being built, attempts being made. We'll talk about D.C. in a minute. But to merge the military and the, as Phil Hegseth put it, the homeland defense mission. Tell me about the ways the military and homeland have typically been kept separate and what it might mean for them to be merged.

Radley Balko (45:18)

So, you know, in this country, we've long had a tradition of keeping the military out of domestic law enforcement. And it goes back to the founding. I mean, there was a fear that, that, I mean, the founders didn't even want to have a full time standing army because they saw what happened in cities like Boston during the colonial era, where the British Crown stationed soldiers in the city mostly for the purpose of tariffs and ending black markets. But it resulted in a lot of anger and resentment and violence. You had these general warrants where they could go into any house at any time to enforce tariffs and import bans. And, and it ultimately led to the Boston Massacre, which is one of the kind of precipitating events of the American Revolution. The point here with the history lesson is that this is why we have a Third Amendment, a fourth Amendment. You could argue it's why we have a second Amendment. So there was this fear that standing armies create problems and that using, particularly using the military for routine domestic policing. That's not what the military does. Right. The military's job is to annihilate a foreign enemy. The job of law enforcement is to protect our rights and, and enforce public safety. And we've done actually a pretty good job over the course of our history of keeping the two separate. There have been times, very briefly when the military has been called up to put down riots or insurrections, and you could argue about whether that was justified or not. The only time the military was brought in to sort of consistently enforce routine domestic law enforcement was during Reconstruction. That was obviously a, hopefully once in our country's history, sort of eventually. But we've kept these two things separate. And one of the really healthy things about our democracy is that the institution that's been most consistent and aggressive about enforcing that separation has been the military. During the 80s, the Reagan administration and leaders of both parties in Congress wanted the military to come in to enforce the drug war. They wanted Marines marching up and down streets and conducting raids and arresting people. And it was the military that said, we want nothing to do with this. There was a high ranking military official who testified before Congress and basically said something effective. History is replete with examples of countries that have brought the military in for domestic law enforcement. And disaster is always the result. And so while there was some use of the military for training, there was the transfer of military equipment to local police agencies. The idea of using the military for active day to day law enforcement was shelled because of opposition from the Pentagon. Throughout sort of the course of my entire career writing on these issues, I've always been worried about the idea that our police are getting more militarized. They're getting more and more like soldiers. They're seeing their job as more like soldiers, and that means they're seeing the people they're supposed to be serving as the enemy. And what I feared was another September 11th style event was going to exacerbate that process and make the police even more militarized. Even in kind of the worst case scenarios. I never thought we'd reach the day where a President would just start openly deploying the military in cities across the country simply because they don't support him. I mean, that is. I mean, it's hard to. A lot of people made this point. It's hard to sort of describe what is actually going on right now without sounding crazy, because the idea that the President is going to deploy the military into cities and states that didn't vote for him because he's angry at them for that, or he's going to stop sending them disaster relief because they didn't vote for him. I mean, that is clearly the stuff of totalitarian regimes.

Ezra Klein (49:00)

I both agree, and I guess they would say it's not because they didn't vote for them, it's because of something else. So in the LA case, it's because of protests. So I so want to try to do the fair minded thing of describing this in the way they would describe it, but also to say they are unleashing ICE agents in a way that seems to be designed to create backlash and then they use the backlash. We talked about this at the beginning as an escalation cycle, but at least, at least in air quotes in the LA case, it was connected to this immigration mission, which is very central to the Trump campaign. D.C. wasn't. D.C. isn't what's been their rationale for taking over. I mean, it feels, when I talk to the people there, occupying, militarily, occupying Washington dc.

Radley Balko (49:59)

So the justification is this kind of unique relationship that Washington D.C. has with the federal government. So the federal government ultimately has jurisdiction over D.C. pretty much in any way that it wants to assert itself. Now, Congress is the primary overseer, I guess, of D.C. and Congress has passed various home rule bills over the years that has given D.C. a certain amount of autonomy. So what Trump is doing is violating those bills that were passed by Congress. But as we've seen in just about every other area, in order for that to matter, Congress would have to sort of stick up for itself, and that clearly isn't going to happen here. So. So you could argue that LA was tied to immigration enforcement, which is a federal power. You could argue that what's happening in D.C. is based on this unique relationship that D.C. has with the federal government. And in both cases, you could say these are exceptions. But Trump is openly promising to send troops into Chicago, into Oakland, into Baltimore. He is not claiming that he wants to send troops into those cities to enforce immigration. He's saying it's because crime is out of control in those cities. And incidentally, all three cities have seen dramatic drops in crime. Baltimore is at a, I think a 30, 40 year low in violent crime. Oakland, it's dropped pretty dramatically. Chicago's dropped a little bit. But you know, what he's promising to do going forward makes it clear that this isn't about federalism or keeping the nation's capital safe. It's not about immigration enforcement. I mean, these are all very blue cities. They're cities with large black populations with black political leadership. And they're cities that Trump has been disparaging for his entire political career.

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Ezra Klein (53:49)

When I think about this rolling forward. When I look at what they did in dc, when I look at what they did in la, when I look at what they are talking about doing, the potential for genuine catastrophe feels very high. So I'm sitting here in New York City. So let me spin out a scenario that's Been on my mind. Zoran Mamdani is the front runner to be the next mayor of New York to the Trump administration. I think Zoran Ramdani is the exact kind of politician they would relish confrontation with that they would find immensely offensive. His very existence, the fact that he has been elected in New York City, a city that obviously Donald Trump has very deep feelings about.

Radley Balko (54:32)

They want to deport him.

Ezra Klein (54:33)

They want to deport him. They would, I think, also see him as a soft target of a certain kind, very inexperienced. You know, has not been a mayor for a long time, does not have a lot of, you know, political background, political alliances. You can really imagine Mamdani coming into office, the administration stepping up ICE raids even above where they are now. I mean, Brad Lander, during the campaign, the comptroller of New York City ended up arrested as he was accompanying immigrants at court during these ICE raids. You can imagine them really stepping up ICE raids then using some kind of backlash to that as pretext for sending in the National Guard, as they did in la, or sending in, as Phil Hegseth wants, the National Guard, plus more Marines and other kinds of military officials or soldiers, and something going really wrong or maybe from their perspective, right. So in D.C. there was a case, a guy who appears to be drunk. I think there's a sandwich. They made a very big deal out of this. Maybe in New York or elsewhere. It's not a sandwich. Maybe it's a rock, or maybe there's gunfire, or maybe there's not gunfire. There is a car backfiring that some member of the National Guard thinks is gunfire, and they open up retaliatory fire. Maybe there's all of a sudden a bunch of people dead. Maybe there's violence. Right. There's already been tear gas at these things. It is there for a crisis point to be reached where then they're saying, well, it's an insurrection, and now we're invoking the powers of the Insurrection Act. It just, when you look at this, both what it seems to me they want, and even if they didn't really want that, the conditions they are creating, it seems very frightening.

Radley Balko (56:23)

Yeah. And I think it puts the residents of these cities in a really a can't win position. Right. I mean, you either submit and allow this to happen and get accustomed to the idea of looking out your kitchen window and seeing soldiers march by, or. Or you put up resistance, in which case you create exactly the kind of scenario that you just described, which I think they want. If, say, Pritzker in Illinois activated the Illinois National Guard to protect immigrant neighborhoods in Chicago from these raids. I mean, particularly if we see they're arresting or harassing U.S. citizens and people who are here legally. And then you've got this standoff, especially if you get what we're seeing in D.C. which is red states are now sending National Guard troops into Washington, D.C. to assist with whatever it is they're doing there. All of a sudden, now you've got red states sending Guard troops into blue states who don't want them there. It is a recipe for exactly the kind of catastrophe you're talking about. I think the Trump administration relishes the idea of an incident like that because it'll allow them. It'll give them an excuse to. To grab more power and to become even more aggressive.

Ezra Klein (57:43)

And you think back to something that happened in the first term that you actually mentioned. So you have the murder of George Floyd. You have nationwide protests that break out afterwards. You have Trump wanting to unleash the military on these protests and saying, suggesting to top military brass that they should open fire at their knees. And the military says no. But you write that nearly everything he has done in his second term with respect to the military appears to have been done to ensure that no order he gives will ever be questioned again, no matter how cruel, abusive, or unconstitutional. So tell me what he has done. What is different about the chain of command and oversight in the military now than in, say, 2020?

Radley Balko (58:38)

Well, I mean, he has. I mean, part of Project 2025 was to purge federal agencies of institutionalists, of people who had these silly allegiances to the rule of law and the Constitution and replaced them, the people whose primary loyalty was to Trump. So we could start at the top with Hegseth. I mean, Hegseth wrote in his book about his fierce loyalty to Trump. This is a guy who thinks that the military should be enl in a holy war and believes that Trump was sent by God. I mean, that is who is heading up the largest, most powerful military in human history. One of the other things they did, they immediately purged all of the generals that they thought were insufficiently loyal, people who still clung to ideas like separation of the military from domestic law enforcement. Those people were ousted. They got rid of all the JAG corps, the senior ranking legal lawyers in the military who do things like write use of force policy in the military, the people that the president consults when wanting to do policies like this. And they're usually the ones who tell him no, they're gone. Instead, you have this policy written by not just the least qualified person, I think, to ever have been nominated to head up a major federal agency, but by that guy's brother. Right. I mean, that is the person who is writing up the policy about when Trump's going to start sending active duty military into cities around the country.

Ezra Klein (60:16)

It's so grim. I mentioned a minute ago the possibility of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act. So what is the Insurrection Act? What does it allow him to do if he invokes it, it, and why haven't they yet?

Radley Balko (60:34)

So it allows him to bring up active duty military to put down a threat to take over the country or to depose the government. I believe the first instance of it was Washington invoked it to put down the Whiskey Rebellion. It's been used pretty sparingly over the years, but it's supposed to be something the President can invoke in the case of an emergency. Eventually, they're supposed to get approval from Congress after doing so. And, you know, it's supposed to be temporary. It's supposed to be, you know, there's this immediate threat that we have to address quickly and put it down. It is not supposed to be a way to suppress dissent or suppress protest. Trump, you know, wanted, again, wanted to invoke it in his first term, if I recall correctly. I think Mike Pence supported the idea, but it was Esper and Milley who said, no, that's completely inappropriate for what we're looking at right now.

Ezra Klein (61:34)

Esper, the Defense Secretary, and Milley, the.

Radley Balko (61:37)

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both of whom Trump is since accused of treason, and Milley, I think he actually suggested, should be executed for treason, in part because of that and telling people about it afterward. So, yeah, it's supposed to be in response to a direct threat to the sovereignty of the country. The reason they haven't invoked it is because they found ways around evoking it. I mean, I think invoking it they know at this point would be hugely controversial. There would probably be a lot of backlash. So they found these other ways around it without having to go through the Insurrection act, which I think even they realized would be really divisive.

Ezra Klein (62:12)

I really, I try temperamentally as a person and as somebody with a public platform to not be overly alarmist and to make people completely panicked about things they cannot control. But something I've been saying when I talk to people I know about my work recently is that I can tell you a story where these things maintain some kind of containment. I mean, they're already much, much worse than I would have Imagined the masked officers pulling people off the street. But things didn't get as bad as I thought they might in Los Angeles. Maybe everybody holds back from where it could go. But if I imagine reading a book, reading a history of this period in 10 years, and this period having gone really badly, having either created a tipping into authoritarianism in a way that you cannot deny, or having created some kind of genuinely violent flashpoint between the government and a citizenry that resolves in some way we can't predict right now. This is the way I would have expected this set of chapters in the early months to read. Right? Yeah. These are the chapters where if you were reading them and it gets worse, it wouldn't feel like a surprise, it would feel like a linear progression.

Radley Balko (63:35)

Yeah. I mean, it's almost a cliche at this point to say, how would this latest thing that Trump has done read if it were happening in, say, Albania or. Or Peru or Uganda? Right. I mean, we would say that seems pretty clear, like there's an authoritarian takeover going on. I was at a conference on liberalism and democracy last weekend, and one of the keynote speakers was a Russian dissident who kind of saw Putin's rise. And what I found particularly haunting was the similarities between the quick, just speed with which he started dismantling institutions, and that is Project 2025. I mean, part of the strategy there is to move so quickly on so many fronts that you overwhelm people, and it's impossible to keep track of everything that's going on. Now, Russia was a much, much, much younger democracy with much weaker institutions, so it was easier to topple them within. In a year. But what we're seeing right now, like you said, I mean, if you were trying to replicate that path to autocracy, I don't know what you would be doing differently than what Trump is doing now.

Ezra Klein (64:51)

What then is the role of civil society, of political opposition here? You talked earlier about the no win position these cities and people in them are being put into. On the other hand, and opposition to this seems to have revitalized Karen Bass. Mayoralty in Los Angeles seems to have lit a fire under Gavin Newsom in interesting ways. You said you're a bit of a student of history. I don't ever think it's fair to ask people what works in these scenarios. Everything is different, and it's all very complicated. But when you see civil society and political opposition, when you see them doing X, makes you think, okay, there's life in this versus what worries you that we're on the Speedway to authoritarian takeover.

Radley Balko (65:38)

I think the least optimistic I feel is when we see these powerful institutions cave and crumble out of fear. So watching the Ivy League schools falter when it's, I think even the most, most cynical Supreme Court watchers seem pretty certain that they would win in court and that these are, what Trump is doing to these schools is pretty clearly an attack on free speech, free expression, academic freedom. Watching the law firms cave, which, I mean, the case that they would have on court is even stronger. Watching media companies cave. I mean, the 60 Minutes edit of the Kamala Harris interview was just basic standard journalism. And the idea that their parent company capitulated over that. I mean, these are extremely powerful, wealthy entities that could stand up to Trump if they wanted to, and they've chosen not to. And I think that is watching them sort of fall one by one has been really disheartening and disorienting sources of optimism. I think the no Kings protest you had literally, I think the count estimate was around 5 million people around the country had come out. My wife and I were at my parents place in Nashville, Indiana at the time, which is a overwhelmingly white, rural part of Indiana, and there was a protest with about 100 people, maybe a little less. I mean, the interesting thing to me is that where we're seeing kind of the bravest resistance is from the people with the least amount of power, right? You see the little league coach in New York who told ICE agents off when they started questioning his kids as players about their immigration status. There was just an incident where a bunch of kids in backpacks in D.C. basically ran off. A bunch of ice and federal, maybe National Guard or probably, it's hard to tell them apart at this point, but federal agents who were there to do immigration enforcement and literally schoolchildren yelling at them until they had to leave. So we are seeing the kind of inspiring resistance from people with the least amount of power and who would be easiest for the administration to kind of target. I mean, even sandwich guy. I don't recommend throwing sandwiches at police officers, but he kind of became a bit of a folk hero after that because I think when you see troops in your backyard, literal troops marching in your backyard, there's a visceral reaction to that and it's angering. But then also you see the administration's reaction to that, right? He wanted to turn himself in. They wouldn't let him. Instead, they had to send a SWAT team basically with a video recorder to his apartment so they could post on social media. That sort of resistance was not going to be tolerated, as a lot of people pointed out. I mean, saying kill the cops to your comrades during an insurrection on the Capitol gets you a high ranking Justice Department position, whereas throwing a sandwich at a police officer in this administration gets you a felony charge. I mean, that speaks volumes about where we are. To answer your question, I think we need to take, take heart in that Little League coach. And then the people who don't want to live in a country where their neighbors and friends and people they go to church with and eat breakfast with and landscape their yards are being yanked off the street into unmarked vans and taken to undisclosed locations. If the big institutions and the law firms and the universities are going to roll over to that, I think we need to take inspiration from the people who are standing up to it.

Ezra Klein (69:24)

And also a final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

Radley Balko (69:28)

Yeah, so I was trying to think of three sort of interesting, maybe a little off topic books. The first will be on topic, but Jessica Pischko's book Highest Law in the Land, which is a narration of sort of how the sheriff in the US has become such an integral part of the Trump movement in maga, and how they've lent a lot of sort of institutional support for it, including some pretty outrageous tactics, and how they're kind of above the law in a lot of part in much of the country. That's one that's kind of on topic. I'm going to recommend for a kind of a fun history, David Mitchell, the British comedian, as a book came out, I think maybe a year or two ago called Unruly, which somehow manages to make a history of medieval Age British royalty interesting and funny. And so it's kind of a review of sort of all the early English kings, but in his kind of style, which I found very endearing. And I listen to it on tape. So in his voice it's particularly fun to listen to. And I guess the last one would be my friend and former colleague Kerry Halley's book Bottoms up and the Devil Laughs, which is a book on the surveillance state and reality winner and kind of how the national intelligence community has kind of evolved into what it is now. And I think it's particularly relevant because of the way Trump has been able to manipulate these tools that have been put into place by previous administrations that are really opaque and unaccountable and pretty dangerous. And now I think we're going to see just how dangerous they are when they're in the hands of the wrong person.

Ezra Klein (71:07)

Radley Bako thank you very much.

Radley Balko (71:09)

My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Ezra Klein (71:21)

This episode of the Israel Clancho is Produced by Jack McCordick, Fact Checking by Will Pischel. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld, Mixing by Isaac Jones and Amit Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassion, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Roland Hu, Kristin Lin, Michelle Harris and Yan Graham Coble. Original music by Pat McCusker audience strategy by Christina Semuluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Pending audio is Annie Rose Strasser.

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