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- [00:00]
Host or Interviewer
All hell continues to break loose in the streets across the country as masked ICE agents and what I consider to be Trump Gestapo are everywhere. They're oftentimes now arresting, like, the wrong people. And this hit me locally here. As many of you may know, I live in Pasadena, California. And very recently, ICE arrested a Pasadena mother in front of her children while without a warrant. And the children were saying, what are you doing? Like, this is. It can't be my mom.
- [00:36]
Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs
Who.
- [00:36]
Host or Interviewer
Who are you even looking for? And, you know, these agents refused to identify themselves or who they are. And it turns out, you know, it was the wrong person. Let me just show you what went down, because I've been showing you video clips like this across the country. It's just a terrible thing to see that this is happening in the United States of America. You play this clip.
- [00:53]
Rosalina Luna Vargas
Got a warrant? You don't have a warrant. No, you don't. No, you don't. Show me. Show me right now. Where's the war? No, no, no. Show me the war.
- [01:01]
Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs
Up.
- [01:01]
Rosalina Luna Vargas
We're not going to let her go. Yo, get your hands on my mom. Please. Show me first. Where's the warrant? No, no, no, no. Come on. Can you go? We have a right.
- [01:19]
Host or Interviewer
You know, just to give you some context of their. ICE arrested a Pasadena mother without a warrant. Wrong person. Two of the three agents even had a badge. None were in uniform, as you saw there. A witness said, I didn't know if I was witnessing a hate crime or a kid. The video cuts off just as daughter begs call the police. And because they might have been law enforcement, I wasn't even sure whether to call the police or what to do with these people. Jillian Reed did end up calling 91 1, reporting what she thought was a kidnapping of her mom. Rosalina Luna Vargas was eventually taken into custody despite her two children's best efforts. After inflicting all of that trauma, ICE later admitted they arrested the wrong person by mistake in the first place. Told the family they had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. We're hearing this all too often. And, you know, I think about what went down in San Diego as well at the Bona Faqueta restaurant. I mean, hardworking people in the restaurant there. And, you know, I have video here, and you all may remember this of ICE just like, turning a peaceful, vibrant area, you know, into like, what looked like a war zone. Here, let me show you this. This was in San Diego where ICE storm bona forta and military gear. And you'll see all the people out on, on the street here. Let's play it. And now we know that Donald Trump is going to Florida, where he's going to a place they're calling in Florida, Alligator Alcatraz, which was this old airstrip in the Everglades. And there are alligators there. So if you leave the facility, you can get killed and eaten by alligators. And they're all bragging about how migrants can die if they dare walk off the area and be eaten by alligators. I mean, this is some disgusting stuff right here. I want to bring in Democratic Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs, who represents portions of San Diego, eastern San Diego and some of the surrounding areas. And Congresswoman, I know you were very outspoken about the incidents in San Diego. Of course, is cruelty that, like, what are we witnessed? Like, how is this, how is this America?
- [03:43]
Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs
Look, I think they are trying to terrify people, right? They are trying to get people to be too afraid to come here and to literally get them to self deport and to get people who are even legally here or maybe even citizens, but are look like they might be immigrants to be afraid. And that's bad for everyone. You know, in San Diego, where the. We're a border community, right? We are on the border and we know better than most how important immigrants are to our community and to our economy. And we've already seen the impacts of this. We see that kids are starting to not go to school because their parents are afraid that they might get picked up dropping them off. We've seen ICE agents pick people up while they are literally leaving the courthouse trying to do the right thing, going through the legal process. Right? We've seen folks go to workplaces like Buena for Canada, where all of that, the flashbangs, the smoke grenades, all of that, the tactical riot gear, they ended up getting four people, none of which had any prior criminal history. Right? This is what we're seeing. And I do think that they are doing this to scare our community and to scare people away from speaking up about how wrong this is.
- [04:58]
Host or Interviewer
No, it just, again, it seems cruelty is the point. Over and over, we saw even Pope Leo XIV sending in a bishop, a newly appointed bishop to be at the San Diego courthouses because of the tactic where people who are there going through a lawful process, they're showing up to court and while they're there, you have ICE agents either waiting in the halls to arrest them or waiting in the bushes outside when they leave the court. And then they do this thing where they like dismiss the cases so that they can then do expedited you know, deportations. And it's, tell me more about the impact it's having on, on the community. What are you hearing from constituents? Because for all of the viewers who know to San Diego, you know, has a conservative element, you know, to it as well. It's not, you know, a foregone conclusion that there'll be a Democratic congressmember from, from your district or from the area talk to us about our views changing. What are you seeing?
- [06:04]
Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs
Look, one of the things about this whole issue about immigration is that I often find the closer you live to the border, the actually less partisan it gets. Right? Like even Republicans in San Diego know how important immigrants are to our economy here, right to our workforce. Many, many people live in Tijuana and work in San Diego every single day. People are constantly crossing back and forth across the border. And I think we just have a different understanding. It's much harder to fear monger when you're actually living this day to day than when you're a far away and just seeing what they show you on FOX News or something else. And so I will say, like, I have been so incredibly proud of our community in San Diego across the board standing up and saying this is not okay. You know, we, I've had people who I know are lifelong conservatives, lifelong Republicans who have started speaking up and saying this is not okay. This is not good for our community. This is not making any of us safer. And by the way, being a border community, San Diego is still one of the safest big cities in the whole country because this is not actually about public safety. This is about scaring people. And you know, one of the things I talk to our local police departments and our local sheriffs all the time in California, we have a state law where they aren't allowed to do immigration enforcement. But even still, we are starting to see people not reporting crimes because they are worried about if they report a crime, what it will mean for their immigration, even if they're a citizen. But maybe they live in a mixed status family, which is very, very common in San Diego. And just last week we saw plainclothes officers, none of them who identified themselves take a woman as she was leaving her workplace. So again, this is not actually making us safer. As a young woman myself, I'm very concerned about someone coming up and playing clothes, saying that they are a member of law enforcement without any real identification and that you're just supposed to submit. Like to me as a young woman who like my whole life has been taught all these different things to do to keep myself safe like that is a really scary proposition. And the idea that that's what our constituents are being subjected to by this administration, it's really dangerous. It's not making us safer also.
- [08:22]
Host or Interviewer
What's not making us safer in my view is this disastrous budget bill. I mean, there was previous a comprehensive immigration bill that Donald Trump killed that was on the table would have made us safer, stronger borders. But reflecting a pathway to citizenship for hard working people was a compromise right. Between Democrats and it was led by a very right wing senator from Oklahoma, of all places. And Trump said, no, I don't want that. But what they do want, apparently is a disastrous budget bill that's going to kick off 15 million people from Medicaid and it's going to cause devastation in communities across the country. How is it going to impact your district, eastern San Diego, the surrounding areas? And in general, what's your reaction to this as the Senate's made it worse?
- [09:13]
Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs
Yeah, I mean, I think many of us were hoping the Senate was going to at least take out some of the most harmful provisions. Alas, they have actually made it worse. I guess lesson learned, never trust the Senate. Something I should have already learned in my time in the House. But the thing is, this is a really devastating bill. It's going to cut, it's going to kick 18 million people off of their health care. It's going to make millions of people more hungry. Our food bank in San Diego already feeds about 400,000 people a year and that number is going to skyrocket with this bill and there's going to be less food to go around. You know, I've been talking to folks all across my district about what this means. About 1 in 5 people in San Diego county rely on Medicaid for their health care. And I met little Delilah, who's five years old and loves singing and dancing and counting and has a numerous amount of health challenges. And Medicaid is the only way that she's able to get her health care. Or two year old Cesar, who has short gut syndrome and a few other things. He has about 20 to 30 health care appointments a year. And again, Medicaid is the only way he's able to get the health care that he needs. So I know some of my Republican colleagues like to talk about how this is about waste, fraud and abuse or, you know, in California about not letting immigrants access Medicaid. But the fact of the matter is these are real people in our community who are going to be hurt by these cuts. And like we are going to be paying for this health care one way or another. This, this bill adds, you know, probably $4 trillion to the deficit. And in a time when we already have a super high debt and yet the kinds of investments we need to be making are in investing in preventative medicine, because we actually get a $12 return for every $1 we invest in preventative medicine. And so you can pull this health care away. This is the cheaper, more preventative healthcare that's going to help our community. We're going to be paying for it anyways in emergency care that's more expensive and less good for our communities. And that's what I've been hearing across the board from folks in my district.
- [11:23]
Host or Interviewer
It also just feels like a massive betrayal, obviously, to current people who are going to be impacted, but to future generations, to younger people. It just seems like one of the things that Donald Trump claimed that he was going to do is make things more affordable for younger people. You're the youngest member of California's congressional delegation. You're about five years, four years younger than me. I just turned 40. And you know, our generation, people struggle to pay their rent, yet alone be able to afford a home. There's a lot of people feeling that this idea of the American dream, if you did certain things and you worked a job, you'd be able to live a life that we saw our parents at least, or grandparents be able to live it at least in terms of buying a home. But over the past, this disastrous 155, 160 days, whatever it's been, it seems that it's made things far worse. And this disastrous bill is going to, I think, crush our generations and future generations. Thinking about my daughter, who I just brought to a doctor's appointment, who's eight months old, I'm just thinking about her generation and what we're doing. Can you speak to that, given your position as the youngest California member of Congress?
- [12:44]
Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs
Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely right. Like our generation, and you know, we are so used to politicians making bad decisions that have reverberated for decades. Right. Whether it's how they addressed the financial crisis or the lead up to it, how they addressed the Iraq war. Right. Like, we are still dealing with the consequences of those decisions made when I was in middle school. Right. And yet we're doing the same thing again. And one thing I think we need to be clear about, like, this is not just this bill, right. The status quo was not working for too many people in our generation, for too many people in our generation, they couldn't afford homes, they couldn't afford childcare. Ben, I don't need to tell you, you know, how hard everything is right now. So we need to, we need to recognize the role and the part that we as Democrats played in perpetuating that status quo. But this bill, this bill is going to make things, like, so much worse. Right? Because not only is it going to be kicking people off of the health care that they need, it's going to make health care premiums more expensive for everybody. It's getting rid of all these different things that our communities rely on to be successful, all to give more tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations. And it's going to add about $4 trillion to the deficit. So. And it's going to be our generations that then are going to be left having to pay off that debt instead of making the investments that we know we need to make our communities better and stronger, like in preventative medicine, like in quality early childhood education, child care, like in all these things that I feel like our generation really knows we need. And yet now we're going to be stuck holding the bag, not only on these bad policies, but on this debt that they're leaving us all to give tax breaks to their friends.
- [14:31]
Host or Interviewer
Finally, Congressman, I always like to ask this question because sometimes when you do an interview like this or you go on a cable news network, they've got their set questions. But I'm sure there are areas and issues and topics that are really important to you that you don't get asked the question that deserves more attention. So given that we have this platform where we're approaching 6 million subscribers, I always like to throw it to the Congress member and say, is there something that's out there that's not getting enough attention that you want to bring attention to, that you think our viewers should know and in turn that they should be sharing with other people.
- [15:04]
Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs
Absolutely. So I'll say two things. One is child care. Look, I know that probably our generations know a lot about how difficult the child care crisis is. Right now in San Diego, about 2/3 of people live in a childcare desert where they can't even find childcare, let alone afford it. And I do think this is fundamentally one of the most important investments we can make in fixing our society, because if you can make sure every kid gets what they need early on in life, they will have better outcomes throughout their whole life. But the second thing I will say that I think is definitely not getting enough attention is the conflict in Sudan. We are seeing millions of people being displaced. It's the world's largest displacement crisis. You've got about 14 million people who are on the brink of famine. And it's two warring parties, one of which is being primarily supported by the United Arab Emirates. The United States is the largest supplier of weapons to the United Arab Emirates. The UAE is then supporting this militant group, the Rapid Support Forces. Our State Department has said that the RSF has committed genocide and acts of war. Truthfully, both sides have committed war crimes, but the RSF has committed genocide. And I think that all of us, especially our generation that grew up with the Save Darfur movement, that understands how bad the situation is and can get, need to be speaking up more because it is a horrifically horrific humanitarian situation and we need to be doing more to help stop it.
- [16:41]
Host or Interviewer
Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs, thanks for joining us.
- [16:44]
Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs
Thanks for having me, everybody.
- [16:46]
Host or Interviewer
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