Loading summary
Transcript56 lines
- [00:07]
A
Hi, John.
- [00:08]
B
Hi, how are you?
- [00:08]
A
Good. Thanks so much for being here.
- [00:10]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [00:11]
A
So in your recent piece about the firing of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, you wrote that Noem will be remembered as the most incompetent secretary in the department's history. Now, I don't really want to make a case for Nome's competence, but I do wonder how we're supposed to reconcile this idea of Noem being incompetent with the fact that the Trump administration has deported so many people. Like, was she incompetent yet effective?
- [00:40]
B
That's an interesting question. I think her incompetence is just evidenced by how she handled herself in the job. I mean, she trivialized much of the department's work. I actually think she succeeded where a lot of progressive activists have failed over the years, which is almost by instantly delegitimizing so much of what the department does. You know, she dressed up in different outfits at different moments. She fumbled when it was time to account for herself before Congress, and that's to say nothing of the substantive things that have happened while she's been in that role. There have been historic and to my mind, unprecedented abuses committed by the department under her leadership, a level of chaos, infighting, confusion that she's responsible for, by and large. And I think to your question, the idea that, you know, here she is, as the secretary of the administration's kind of flagship department, prosecuting the President's number one priority, you know, it takes a certain amount of skill, let's say, to kind of veer from the President's good graces. I mean, all she essentially had to do was kind of toe the administration line. And she managed somehow to like, call an audible. And, you know, with Corey Lewandowski, a former presidential adviser, someone who she's allegedly having an affair with, although she's denied it, the two of them just seemed almost single handedly to be running the department and to be running it into the ground, which is just to say, you know, here was a chance for her ostensibly to be in the President's good graces and to do everything the President wanted. And even that she managed to flub. And some of that was also because she, you know, she took certain liberties that were in plain view. Flying on private planes, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns, and then afterwards saying, oh, well, the President allowed me to do that. I mean, each of these things are major missteps. So in that sense, even though the administration has done horrible things in the immigration enforcement space, I still think that she, by and large, will be regarded as a failure, really, by anyone, whether you're someone kind of left of center or right of center.
- [02:46]
A
That's Jonathan Blitzer, who just wrote a piece for the New Yorker about Kristi Noem, the former Secretary of Homeland Security, getting fired from her post. Under Noem's leadership, DHS has been one of the most powerful and consequential departments of Trump's second term, particularly over the past three months as ICE and Border Patrol agents have swept through several major American cities. But even Republicans who support Trump's hardline immigration policies had started to sour on Noem, who faced accusations of fiscal mismanagement, self promotion, and had a generally cavalier attitude toward the human consequences of immigration enforcement. I wanted to talk with John about the lead up to Noem's firing, the history of DHS and how it's operated under the past four US Presidents, and what lies ahead for DHS following Noem's dismissal. This is the political scene. I'm Tyler Foggatt and I'm a senior editor at the New Yorker. Let's talk about why exactly it was that she was fired. Because, as you mentioned, there's just been, like, this litany of controversies surrounding her tenure at dhs, specifically with ICE and Border Patrol and then the killings of Renee Goode and Alex Preddy. And one might assume that her firing was almost Trump capitulating to public outrage to how DHS has operated under Noem. But how much of her dismissal actually has to do with, like, that public pressure to get rid of her versus something else entirely?
- [04:12]
B
I'm really glad you asked this question, because I don't think her firing is a sign that the administration is in any way meaningfully reconsidering any aspect of its immigration policies. I think this firing is about a personal matter. I think the story became about her. She pulled attention away from the President. She pulled attention away from the president's agenda. There were questions swirling around Congress and in the media about these personal junkets. She went on ad campaigns that she did apparently without anyone else's approval, really, let's say clumsy appearances before Congress, rumors about her mismanagement. I think all of this has to do with those lines being crossed. I've seen reporting also that suggests that in the end, one of the president's biggest frustrations with her was the fact that when asked by members of Congress about this $220 million ad campaign that had her riding on a horse in front of Mount Rushmore to record a
- [05:08]
A
message with Chaps on, right?
- [05:09]
B
With chaps on. Yeah, yeah.
- [05:10]
A
Have to mention the chaps.
- [05:11]
B
Exactly. You know, she basically said after the fact that, you know, she had agreed to that campaign with Trump, which appears not to have been true. And that was something that bothered Trump. I mean, it was none of the actual substantive issues that have happened or taken place inside the department that in any way has cooled the president to her or to what she represents. I think it's been essentially a personal matter.
- [05:37]
A
What is your understanding of how Noem became DHS secretary? I feel like there's, like, been a lot of, like, when Trump announced his Cabinet appointments, there was a lot of, like, Lee Zeldin for epa. Really? Why? And, like, I guess I'm wondering what we know about why Noem was chosen for this role, given, as you stated earlier, that DHS was kind of like the flagship Trump department.
- [06:00]
B
You know, it's a really good question. And I have to say, you know, I haven't come up with a good accounting of this in my own reporting, and I haven't yet seen a definitive accounting of it in anyone else's reporting. And maybe we'll see more now that she's out. You know, I will say one important thing in all of this, which is that everything I've heard about Stephen Miller over the years, and I've done a lot of reporting on Stephen Miller. You know, the president's really, at this point, not even just his immigration adviser during the first Trump term. You could call Stephen Miller his chief immigration advisor. Now. He's essentially. People refer to him as the prime minister of the Trump government, Essentially someone who has say over every matter of the president's agenda. He has always bristled at the possibility of someone being in that role at DHS who could challenge him or who might have an independent cast of mind or who might have a set of qualifications, let's say that adds a level of gravitas and seriousness to the post. He's someone who has always been incredibly territorial and competitive about who gets to be the kind of immigration policy and enforcement expert. And so I think in some ways, people who probably were better qualified for the job may have been scared off of it, for one thing. And in another sense, I also think that people who are weaker in that role tend to serve Miller more personally because he gets to call the shots. And, you know, insofar as someone starts to push back against him, then that person's gonna face some real political problems inside the administration. Now, I don't know he and Noem had any kind of alignment before. And in fact, what I've heard about her initial nomination was that she wasn't necessarily Miller's top pick, but that he didn't object for all these obvious reasons. But I don't quite understand how someone like Noem leaps to the front of the line for that nomination, just as I don't understand, frankly, how now her successor, Mark Wayne Mullen, an Oklahoma senator, who, as far as I can tell, I've covered this stuff for a while, does not have a lot of experience at all in immigration matters, or for that matter, in any kind of national security matters.
- [08:02]
A
Experience in mma, though, which I think is really important.
- [08:04]
B
It's tough, right? But which gets. I mean, as absurd as it all is, it does get to this kind of theme in Trump Cabinet world, which is people who kind of who look the part or who have some very superficial attribute. I mean, I almost sound naive describing it so earnestly, but like, anyone who's got some sort of, like, notional qualification, like Mark Wayne Mullen's toughness, you know, or, you know, one thing that has been reported and that I've been able to confirm myself, is that, you know, Noem initially was gonna be, or at least was being considered as a running mate back in 2024, and for a variety of reasons, she fell out of the running. But one of them was this embarrassing publication of her political memoir where she described in frankly inexplicable detail how she decided to kill the family dog, crucially named Cricket. Cricket. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Rip. And Trump apparently was disgusted by that story and actually said to Don Jr. An avid hunter, like, you know, you kill pretty much anything, but you'd never kill a dog. But after the fact, once Trump won reelection and was then casting about for Cabinet secretaries, it was said that the fact that she recounted that Noem recounted that story somehow put her in good stead. And as a kind of person who could make the tough decisions that one would have to make as Secretary of Homeland Security.
- [09:25]
A
Wow. Like, she has the, like, requisite brutality
- [09:28]
B
for the job, I suppose. I mean, we're in this level of analysis, which is obviously dire.
- [09:36]
A
You. You know, you mentioned Stephen Miller earlier, and there's kind of been this, like, long standing theory that he is the person who's actually calling the shots at dhs. And I guess I just wonder, like, is he. If he is actually responsible for the direction of dhs, then how much of what we've seen with, you know, civilians getting killed and just, like, the way in which people have been deported without due process. Like how much of that should be sort of seen as a failure of NoEM versus a failure of Stephen Miller.
- [10:06]
B
I think Noem's failure, first of all, is her complicity in all of that. The fact that she was an unapologetic defender of all of that. She didn't even really pretend to offer a serious pretext for any of the matters you're discussing. I mean, she appeared at this prison, this notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador, where she posed for a photo op in front of a cell full of Salvadoran gang members. Covered in tattoos, she poses with a $50,000 Rolex hat and proceeds to give a speech talking about how she's grateful to the Salvadoran government for taking our terrorists. Her words. You know, when you come to the situation in Minneapolis, for instance, you know, two American citizens are shot and killed in the streets of the city, and what does she say? She calls them domestic terrorists, and when pressed on it, does not back down. And she, time and again, is appearing before Congress, appearing before the news cameras, doubling down on the most hateful rhetoric of the administration and propounding actual lies in that role. So she's as guilty as anyone else, as far as I'm concerned. But I don't think she's ever really been seen as the prime mover of any of those bigger policies. That has been Miller. And I don't think there's gonna be any meaningful change in the Trump administration's immigration policy until he faces a political reckoning, but I just don't see that coming anytime soon.
- [11:23]
A
You've gestured to this a couple times now, but I'm curious about this performative aspect that really seemed to kind of define Noem's tenure at dhs. So, like, you mentioned the kind of crazy commercials and the speech in front of the mega prison in El Salvador where she's wearing the Rolex. And then there's the reporting from CBS about ICE arresting protesters on camera and then letting them go afterwards. You know, like, basically something that's done almost solely for tv. And when you put that together with, like, the general social media presence of dhs, like the memes and like, AI generated art and imagery that critics have pointed out feels very kind of, like, fascist, or at least xenophobic. Like, all these references to heritage and reclaiming the homeland. I guess I'm wondering how much of this is, like, a direction set by Noem and kind of speaks to Noem's own sort of enjoyment of showmanship versus just this, being like the Trump maga Aesthetic like we have a White House where they'll post a meme set to Sabrina Carpenter music.
- [12:25]
B
Right, right. I think both things are true. I think from the top down, that is the ethos and even aesthetics of the administration. This kind of gleeful, hateful, unapologetic, really absurd kind of messaging. And DHS has been at the center of all of that, as you say, like, you know, white supremacist images, refrains, I mean, even honestly in job descriptions. By the way, this is a farther afield of your question, but you know, like job descriptions now for like posts at U.S. citizenship and Immigration Services describe so called homeland defenders who can quote, protect our culture. I mean, that's the language and the worldview of the administration that is not unique to nomenclature. What is unique to Noem is the kind of love of this pageantry. And it's been pointed out to me, I actually hadn't followed her gubernatorial career all that closely prior to her term as Secretary of Homeland Security. But she had a now kind of infamous ad campaign as governor of South Dakota where she posed in these different roles, trying to attract people to the state, saying that there were jobs there, the economy was good. And so she would pose as a plumber, she would pose as a construction worker. And it became, of course, like an object of derision.
- [13:35]
A
It's like every day is Halloween, right?
- [13:37]
B
Exactly, exactly. And she really, I mean, she took that, you know, literally when she, when she assumed the role of Homeland Security secretary. A job, by the way. I mean, we can talk about this. I mean, this is like a very serious. This is the third largest government department, 250,000 employees pulled together, more than a dozen federal agencies. I mean, this is a job that has typically been held by people, whether you agree with their politics or their leadership style or whatever or not, who try to at least communicate a sense of seriousness. And she, from day one seemed to delight in the idea of dressing up as these different agents. So like there she is wearing like the green uniform of the Border patrol agent with the hat, a flak jacket for press appearances, Coast Guard fatigues for an interview about the Coast Guard.
- [14:24]
A
The sartorial possibilities are just endless.
- [14:26]
B
It's unbelievable. And then. But you know, I have to say, covering this stuff, on the one hand, you roll your eyes and you laugh. And you know, initially, you know, when people started calling her Ice Barbie, I thought, okay, like, you know, show me the evidence. And it's abundant, but it does reflect, I think, a kind of warped view of what law enforcement is. And you know, this is happening at a time when the federal government, by Trump and Miller's own directives, is pulling away all of this law enforcement across a range of different law enforcement initiatives to immigration enforcement. I mean, this is an administration basically, that doesn't much care about public safety in a thoroughgoing, serious sense, but instead has, like, identified its villain, immigrants, and is willing and enthusiastic even about throwing any and all resources to that cause. And against that backdrop, a very serious shift in US Law enforcement. You know, Noem is someone who has done everything in front of the cameras to the point you made earlier. I mean, in some instances, arresting people and walking them in handcuffs in front of cameras, only to release them afterwards with no charges, to kind of communicate this idea that, like, anyone in her vicinity who protests is fair game. She will, I think, go down in history for whatever that's worth at this point for really embracing this idea of law enforcement as just a photo op.
- [15:48]
A
I mean, can we talk a little bit more about Corey Lewandowski? Because he was also fired alongside Noem. And you mentioned earlier that there was this alleged affair between the two of them. And I guess I'm just wondering, like, how that relationship or the appearance of that relationship might have affected Noem's ouster. Like, how should we be thinking about that in terms of, you know, her kind of stature at the department, since, you know, this isn't a podcast where we just talk about the affair, just to talk about the affair. There must be a political implication that will impact.
- [16:19]
B
No, I mean, the appearance was bad, and the appearance was persistent enough to really suggest a pattern. You know, they were seen together all the time. They were seen as being virtually inseparable. DHS sources said that Lewandowski was ubiquitous. He was everywhere around the secretary at all times. He wasn't technically a member of the administration. He was not a member of the Department of Homeland Security. He had a kind of a special provisional status called a special government employee that basically allowed him to consult with the government for no more than 130 days a year. It's a position that exists that predated his job. But he really seemed to try to maximize his influence for as long as he could be close to Noem. And, you know, every time there was a kind of controversial decision made by Noem, specifically inside the department, Lewandowski was always nearby. He signs documents as, you know, chief advisor to the secretary when they fly somewhere in a 737 jet, that Noem pushed for the department to have the two of them stay in A private cabin in the back of the plane. There were individual instances where he was reported to have fired a Coast Guard pilot because when they got off of an aircraft, the Coast Guard pilot forgot to give Noem her blanket. And then, of course, they had to rehire the pilot when they realized there was no one else who could fly the aircraft home. So he's really everywhere in all of this. And I should say I don't have any independent reporting on this. I've just sort of been following this.
- [17:53]
A
You just been following the blankie story from afar.
- [17:55]
B
The blanket story, to me, seems like one of the key plot points in the second Trump term. But we now know now that the sort of smoke has cleared from Nome, or is beginning to clear, let's say, from Noem's tenure in the department, that there were specific moves that she and Lewandowski took together that alienated rank and file officials inside the department. So, for instance, some of the most notorious federal agent policing done under the auspices of the mass deportation campaign, specifically in Minneapolis, but also in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Charlotte, there were these roving teams of Border Patrol agents led by a guy named Greg Bovino, who I think was widely regarded as a lunatic. But for whatever reason, Lewandowski and Noem elevated him over other people who are quite conservative and quite serious. People whose view of immigration enforcement differs pretty starkly from my own, for example, but who at least qualified. Yeah, yeah, at least. Were a little bit more steeped in kind of the DHS HQ kind of mentality, who somehow were like, cast aside. And when there were points of tension, Noem and Lewandowski frequently threw those people under the bus. So Greg Bovino, who's now kind of a known entity because we've seen him on social media, we've seen videos of him, there are now investigations into him when there have been instances where, for example, at the White House, Trump wanted to know, why are all these videos circulating? Well, it turns out that Noem was wanted agents like Bovino and others, while they made arrests to record a lot of it for social media. Of course, the irony of that was that these images went viral, these videos went viral, and really, I think, actually managed to kind of pierce the consciousness of the public. And when asked how this happened, she blamed the faction of people at Border Patrol who were actually pushing against Bovino. Someone like Tom Homan, the president's so called border czar, who is no one's idea of a moderate or a pragmatist. Although under the present circumstances, people kind of see him as somehow representing a kind of more sane approach, which is just the mark of the craziness of our moment when he would appear on tv. Noem apparently took it personally and couldn't understand why he got booked and she didn't.
- [20:11]
A
And where is she going now? Like you mentioned in your piece that she was reassigned to a role as special envoy to the Shield of the Americas. What is that?
- [20:19]
B
Well, the first I heard of it was when it was announced that she was going there. You know, the Trump administration has talked about consolidating control over the Western hemisphere, bombing the so called cartels. This has come to mean a range of things from boat bombings in the Caribbean and the Pacific to repeated threats of bombing cartel redoubts in Mexico, which would be a catastrophic and unspeakable policy for the US to adopt vis a vis our ally Mexico, which is our largest trading partner. But this has been a kind of a big part of the Trump ethos and kind of worldview for how the administration can throw its weight around in the region and in the world. I don't know what this looks like concretely. I mean, this seemed to have been announced in conjunction with a kind of regional summit held in Miami where basically right wing leaders all across Latin America gathered to sort of show their solidarity with the American administration. I don't know what Noem's role will actually be. This doesn't seem to have any governing authority. I don't know. I'm kind of going back and forth like, is it worse to be banished to the UN or to the Shield of the Americas? These are the two people who have fallen in the Trump administration. The signal gate casualty who's now having to report to the un. Oh my God, the shame of that. And now NOME reporting to this as yet untested, non existent, sort of pseudo regional law enforcement body.
- [21:44]
A
Shield of the Americas seems like it might have more fashion opportunities. It's kind of giving like a Marvel Avengers.
- [21:51]
B
Same thing. I thought the same thing. I can already see her like in a special uniform.
- [21:54]
A
Yeah, the commercials they write themselves. Let's take a break and then when we come back, I want to talk more about the Department of Homeland Security and sort of what it's changed into over time and what it was initially meant to do when it was created not that long ago. This is the political scene from the New Yorker.
- [22:19]
B
Hi, I'm David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker. At this year's Academy Awards, Timothee Chalamet and Teyana Taylor aren't the only major nominees, the New Yorker will be there too, with two nominated short films, which you can watch@newyorker.com video two people exchanging saliva was executive produced by Julianne Moore and Isabel Huppert, and it's set in a dystopian Paris where kissing is illegal. Our animated short film Retirement Plan follows a man as he dreams about all the things he's going to do when he's done working. You can enjoy both of those films and our full library of acclaimed short films@newyorker.com video.
- [23:15]
A
So I want to take a step back and talk about the DHS more broadly. Given how heavily it's figured into 21st century American politics, I feel like it's really easy to forget that it actually hasn't been around for that long. I think it's the youngest cabinet level department, so I thought we could just maybe take stock of how it's evolved over its lifespan of like 25 years. So why was DHS created and what was its original purpose? Was it always so immigration focused?
- [23:41]
B
It essentially was. It basically sprang up in the aftermath of 9 11, when, among other things, one of the points of policy failure in Washington was the fact that the 19 hijackers who were responsible for the terrorist attacks of 911 had actually entered the US on temporary valid visas. And so there was this immediate question of how it was possible for those people to have entered the country. Four of the 19 attackers on 9 11, they'd fallen essentially out of status. Their visas had expired. And so there was a real push to create a single kind of unitary department that could pull together a bunch of different agencies, agencies that handled immigration, agencies that handled security, national security. And what you saw in the creation of dhs, it was passed in legislation. The legislation responsible for its creation passed in the fall of 2002. And then it came into being shortly after. That was for the first time really a federal department that reframed the idea of immigration in terms of national security. And that was entirely a product of the fallout of 9 11. And there were people in the early days, back when there was this congressional debate about the future of that department, who said, this is a very scary prospect. We don't want to consolidate in a single federal department all of this power, surveillance power, policing power, all of this sort of artillery, both literally and figuratively. But for the most part, anyone who voiced skepticism or concern about what it would mean to have this kind of overweening national department overseeing law enforcement and immigration were basically cast aside. And the Bill to create DHS passed overwhelmingly at around the same time that DHS was created. There were a few other things that are just worth taking stock of. I mean, to many people, this is old news, but it's just sort of worth filling out the landscape at the time. One was the Patriot act in October of 2001, which basically vastly expanded the government's powers of surveillance. You had, early the following year, the creation of a national registry that basically required immigrants from 25 countries, almost all of them Muslim majority countries, to register with the federal government. And the idea, again, was to sort of make this connection between national security and immigration administration and enforcement. One thing that's notable about that national registry, for instance, was in the first year or so of its existence, there was not a single terrorism link that came out of that registry. But there were at least 12,000 people who were put in removal proceedings because of this further scrutiny, because of how they had to come onto the government's radar and so on. And so really, from the very beginning, you have this kind of original sin in the department of reimagining immigration and the power of the government to enforce immigration laws, in specific reference to national security, which of course, allows the government to do much more aggressive sorts of things. And so in the early days of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, you had new agencies that cropped up. One of them was ice, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Before that, it was called the Immigration and Naturalization Service. And in the past, prior to the creation of dhs, Immigration Naturalization Service was basically in charge of all of US Immigration policy, everything from enforcement to the processing of legal immigration applications. The idea now was to break out into different agencies under the umbrella of dhs, some of these different roles. And so Immigration and Customs Enforcement was tasked primarily with the power to arrest and detain immigrants who were here unlawfully. And almost from the earliest days of the creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, you had teams that were known as fugitive operations teams, which, again, gives you a sense of the flavor of the thinking of the time. And the idea was essentially that for this fledgling agency to justify all of the appropriations that its leaders were repeatedly going to Congress to request, they had to show evidence that they were making a great number of arrests. And so almost from the beginning, you had this issue of the department needing to make arrests in order to prove to lawmakers that they deserved more money to make more arrests. And the general political ethos at the time was so much in favor of the creation of this department that you basically had this Real push toward making massive arrests so that these agencies could even beef up further. And so, for instance, in 2003, something like 30% of all of the people arrested by these fugitive operations teams at ICE had criminal records. And that, it turned out, would be the high watermark for the percentage of people who were arrested who had criminal records. Three years later, after the Department of Homeland Security issued quotas that basically mandated that agents make a certain number of arrests a year, it was basically 1,000 arrests a year per team at ICE. And so, you know, you had maybe five people on a team. Take like a city like New York, you'd have five people on a so called fugitive operations team. Their marching orders were, okay, 1,000 arrests a year, which actually I've spoken to people who are on those teams at the time was a really tall order. And so what happens as a result of these kinds of quotas, a greater percentage of people who don't have criminal records get swept up. And within even a couple of years, by 2006, something like 17% of those arrested by ICE had criminal records. And that was a direct result of these quotas. And so what would happen is agents who were going to make a targeted arrest of an individual would make what were called collateral arrests. Anyone they met along the way, they started to arrest because they were trying to bump their numbers up. And this has just been a reality of ICE from the very beginning. But kind of the long standing legacy at ICE at another agency called Border Patrol, which is part of Customs and Border Protection, has essentially been that they get lavish budgets from Congress, much bigger than other law enforcement agencies. I mean, massive, massive, massive budgets. And there are fewer constitutional restraints on how they actually exercise their power. You know, the requirements they have for stopping someone, for entering a private residence, for arresting someone are different than typical law enforcement agents. So you have an exceptionally well funded department with fewer constitutional restraints and, you know, essentially unfettered or relatively unfettered power. And that's been the trend line from the very beginning.
- [30:27]
A
I guess what I'm curious about is just like how the public was responding even then. Like, obviously the Patriot act was super controversial, but in general, like George Bush and the war in Afghanistan did have early high approval ratings. And there was this kind of concern throughout the US about combating terrorism. And so I guess, does it seem like they had more of a green light from the public back then to do this kind of thing?
- [30:49]
B
Yeah, I mean, it was controversial by turns. I mean, typically what would happen is there would be a, you know, a horrible Arrest of someone that seemed completely unjustified, someone who had longstanding ties to the community, a father, a mother, and it would seem senseless and there'd be a public reaction. And sometimes that would affect the government's policy, sometimes it wouldn't. But, you know, it's interesting, through the early years of dhs, comprehensive immigration reform was still a conversation that members of both political parties in Washington entertained. And so the other thing that started to happen was these big enforcement pushes started to coincide with moments in Washington in which the two parties seem to get closer and closer to forging some bipartisan consensus on massive, you know, comprehensive immigration reform, which would consist by and large in legalizing a large portion of people who are undocumented and been living in the United States for years and years and making it tougher at the border and elsewhere on people who didn't have as much of a claim to legalization. And of course, as we know now, there was never a legislative solution. It's just it was too controversial an issue. There was too much cynicism on both sides of the aisle, although I would say particularly on the Republican side of the aisle. And as a result, what remained was basically the enforcement apparatus without any of the corresponding kind of legal reforms or modifications. And so also a precursor or prerequisite for every so called legislative debate about comprehensive immigration reform was that both sides had to agree that DHS needed more money for enforcement. So simultaneously to all of these legislative failures, you also have members of both parties keeping even more money on the enforcement apparatus at dhs. So it grows out of proportion with the dysfunction of Congress in actually trying to legislate on the immigration issue. And so I don't think in some ways the issue really broke through in a public way, in a kind of massive way. I mean, there were some moments sometimes around right wing bills that absolutely shocked the conscience. But you know, for the most part, it was Obama really on Obama's watch, that people started to, I think, fully grasp the scale of how much mass deportation was a fact of U.S. immigration policy. And so that's kind of when I think the issue really kind of crested, at least in terms of public consciousness.
- [33:06]
A
Yeah, let's talk more about Obama, just because I think we've had two presidents from each party running DHS since its creation. So we, you know, we talked about George W. Bush and what that looked like. We of course know what it's looked like under Trump. But of course Obama and Biden also, you know, ran the country, you know, during this period that DHS has been around. And so, you know, Republicans often frame Democratic rhetoric around border security as being much softer than the conservative side. But I'm curious to know more about how DHS has operated under the Democrats, especially compared to Trump, especially since, like, you will see, you know, a lot of activists referring to Obama as the deporter in chief because of his record setting rate of deportation. So, like, have we seen the department become like less abusive under certain presidents, or has it kind of just been like the same trajectory over time?
- [33:53]
B
To answer that, let me start at the present moment and go back because, you know, one thing that's important to note, even just before we get into some of the nuts and bolts of the Obama years, is the department had, in theory, internal offices that were meant to provide some sort of check and monitoring power over the activity of agents. And the current administration has basically dismantled all of that oversight, all of that internal oversight, which is a profound shift. And then what's also happened, and again, I'm gonna kind of back into the Obama years. One thing that Democrats have typically done is recognizing the fact that, okay, obviously there seems to be no legislative possibility of comprehensive immigration reform that would give people a path to legal status. And by the way, the legal immigration system hasn't been reformed in any concrete or meaningful sense since 1990. So there's also all of this just sort of basic administration that has to happen that hasn't happened. And so Democrats by and large have bought into the kind of rough logic of the existence of dhs, the need to, you know, enforce the immigration laws harshly, particularly at the border and so on. But what they've tried to do over the years, and Obama really started it and Biden carried that torch, was to build in essentially different forms of discretion to try to temper enforcement. And so one way of thinking about the Obama years and the Obama legacy is very complicated and very mixed on the immigration question, which we can talk about. But just speaking strictly in terms of like ICE activity, in some ways, I think about the Obama administration vis a vis ICE as basically two presidents, because Obama in his first term and Obama in his second term were really much different in terms of how he thought about, and people in his administration thought about kind of reining in the powers of ice. But essentially what started to happen, what started to get kind of more clear shape beginning really in 2012 and then picking up until 2014, was to create so called enforcement guidelines for ICE officers, essentially laying out kind of rough profiles of who ICE should be going after. And really the intent behind that was by targeting the profiles of who ICE should go after. It was meant to give a wider swath of the undocumented population relief from getting targeted and arrested. So, in other words, if you hadn't committed a crime, if you've lived in the US For a long time, you were essentially gonna be left alone. The Obama administration didn't start this way. The Obama administration, very much with an eye toward trying to craft some sort of comprehensive immigration reform push in Congress, basically inched toward this recognition that they needed to really radically pull back immigration enforcement. But the first, you know, the first Obama term, there was none of that. And really, the first time Obama ever made a move, a kind of overt move in this direction was with the creation of DACA in 2012, which was basically a form of prosecutorial discretion that shielded from arrest and deportation a population of people known very broadly and sympathetically as dreamers. People who came to the United States as children and who were basically American in everything but legal status, who had gone to American schools, who had jobs, who had families here. And in 2012, on the eve of Obama's reelection, he announced this policy that basically was aimed to shield about a million people from arrest and gave them a kind of. This is slightly overstating it, but a kind of provisional form of legal status that allowed them to apply for financial aid, to apply for mortgages, to make car payments, and to begin to formalize their role in daily American life. That was increasingly the direction that the Obama administration went in. It took them, I would say, probably too long to come close to that line of thinking, but that was essentially where they went. And so one of the things that people say in the Biden administration would tell you, and the secretary of DHS, Alejandro Mayorkas, told me this personally back in 2024, was, look, you might have issues with our border policy, but when was the last time. And my orcas asked me this very pointedly. He said, when was the last time you read a story about a grandmother or a grandfather getting arrested by ice? Not during our administration. And the thinking there was very much that, okay, we are gonna hone the enforcement priorities for this agency such that sympathetic people aren't gonna get arrested. The only people who are gonna get arrested are people who have criminal records. Obviously, there are all kinds of exceptions. These are agencies that I think have all kinds of problems and have always had systematic problems. But that was the rough thinking. And so when you get an administration like Trump's, the first thing Trump did during his first administration was to eliminate those priorities the irony, of course, was that that led to fewer arrests because insofar as there were no priorities, agents didn't have as much clarity on who they should go after or how. But what the Trump administration has essentially done from Trump 1 to Trump 2 has been to strip away any of the policies or regulations that temper immigration enforcement. And now, of course, we're in a situation where ICE is operating with a level of impunity that, I mean, I have to be honest with you, I didn't expect it to be this ugly. I didn't expect there to be masked agents driving unmarked cars, whisking people away regardless of whether or not they have legal status. I mean, that's one of the, I think the most concerning trends that we're seeing now are ICE officers arresting people at immigration court hearings or at administrative interviews, people who are saying, look, here are my legal documents. I have work papers, I have temporary protected status. And Isaac saying, we don't care. All of that. We've now gotten to a point where basically some of the people who warned us early on that DHS could become all powerful and could start to become essentially a president's personal army going after political opponents, we're now entering that territory. So we've slid farther and farther and farther, right? And toward this kind of. Of authoritarian outcome on a spectrum that Democrats also have had some place on.
- [40:02]
A
We'll have more of the political scene from the New Yorker in just a moment. Wired has always put a microscope on the people, power and forces she shaping our world. Uncanny Valley brings that same fearless reporting straight to your feed. Is DOGE finally over? Will AI actually democratize American healthcare? Each week, Wired journalists from across the newsroom are going to unpack where politics, technology and Silicon Valley collide. From conversations with tech leaders across Silicon Valley, Internet fandom investigations, and government crackdowns on rigged gambling, we're taking you all over the news cycle, going straight inside the priorities, pressures and power plays driving today's biggest decisions. Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts. I guess I'm wondering what your sense of, like, the short and long term future for ICE is. In particular, the Times recently reported that ICE is focused on conducting more targeted enforcement operations rather than indiscriminate street sweeps, and that arrests have fallen to their lowest levels since September. I mean, what does that signal to you?
- [41:35]
B
Personally, I'm very skeptical that the administration is meaningfully changing course. I Mean, these arrest patterns are gonna ebb and flow. We have seen periods when the arrest numbers seem to drop, and then they surged again. So, for example, in June, when there was this massive federal operation in Los Angeles and arrests spiked, July then calmed a bit, and then in September, there was another operation in Chicago, and we saw even harsher treatment and even more arrests. So I'm reluctant to take the kind of current dip in arrest numbers as a sign that there's kind of a deeper rethinking that's happening inside the administration. You'll recall that Stephen Miller, back in, what was it last May, laid out as a goal for ICE agents to be arresting 3,000 people a day nationwide, which is an insanely high number, and, it should be said, not a number that agents can reach. But when you have someone of that power and that influence inside the White House giving that kind of target, what you're really doing is you're incentivizing agents to do anything and everything they want while they're carrying out their jobs. And, of course, since then, Miller has also said, and this is in the wake of what happened in Minneapolis, he said explicitly, publicly that ICE officers doing whatever in the course of their work have immunity. Those are his words. And so when he sets a number like 3,000 arrests nationwide, that is more than anything else, a kind of call to arms. Right now, the numbers have dropped a bit to, like, I think, a little over 1100 arrests a day. When Trump took office, just to give you a point of comparison, you were roughly between 300 and 400 arrests per day. So, you know, the fact that right now we're seeing a little north of 1,100 arrests a day, when in January, we were seeing closer to between 1300 and 1500 arrests a day, I just think what's been unleashed is not going away anytime soon.
- [43:32]
A
One thing that I'm just curious about, given our discussion earlier about how the roots of DHS really are in this kind of effort to root out terrorism from the United States. I mean, do you think that we're going to see kind of a change in DHS priorities as the Trump administration continues this war in Iran? You know, the concerns about Iranian sleeper cells in the United States and just whether we might kind of see, like, a return to form for dhs, where that becomes, like, a big part of sort of what they're doing, and it might even be a way of gaining back, you know, support for people who have been kind of, like, alienated by what they're doing?
- [44:09]
B
You know, I was Just talking to my editor about this. I've interviewed a number of DHS secretaries over the years, and, you know, each one of them, with varying degrees of credibility, has essentially said some version of, you have to be careful as the head of this department, seeming to embrace overtly political agendas, because in theory, you are presiding over a department that is tasked with overseeing national security, from everything from cybersecurity to Coast Guard to the Secret Service and so on. And that's one thing that has fallen away completely. There isn't even a kind of idea of lip service being paid to the fact that DHS is operating kind of impartially now as an assessor of national security threats. So, in answer to your question, no, that doesn't seem far fetched to me at all. And in fact, already Congressional Republicans are trying to push back on Democrats who currently have frozen further funds going to DHS on the grounds that, you know, if they're going to appropriate more money to dhs, there have to be some basic safeguards against agent abuse. And already Congressional Republicans are pushing back and saying, really during a time of. They can't say war, because then it raises questions about whether or not Congress was consulted. But, you know, during a time of conflict, international conflict, you guys are gonna defang this important department that's tasked with national security. No, I think all of these things are in the mix.
- [45:31]
A
You mentioned the fact that the government is still partially shut down because Democrats have been withholding support for funding DHS without any changes being made to ICE tactics. Do you think that this is, like, an issue that the Democrats can win on? Like, how do you see that conflict resolving?
- [45:47]
B
It's a really good question. And I credit Noem with this, with pulling together Democrats on an issue that generally, you know, scatters them to the winds. Democrats have been terrified of taking on the immigration issue in any sense, and it's been kind of heartbreaking to watch from a moral and political standpoint, because I think it's a. I think it's a losing proposition to try to shy away from one of the biggest issues of our time. But I think Trump gives Democrats for all of the differences that Democrats have inside the party, this level of abuse and unchecked power does give Democrats the space to unify around some commonsensical forms of oversight. And so actually, in that sense, I was pretty struck by the idea that Congressional Democrats held the line on further funding. Now, granted, the Department of Homeland Security right now is. And specifically ICE and Border Patrol are flush with money as a result of Trump's big domestic spending bill passed last summer. But I think it's an important political stance for Democrats to take, and I'm curious to see if they can hold the line. This is one of the big questions leading into the midterms or sort of what are the issues the Democrats are comfortable really kind of drawing the line on? Obviously, health care was one in the last shutdown effort. I mean, look, my view, and my view is colored by the fact that I cover this stuff, is you can't win if you don't stand for something. And this is the most obvious thing you have to stand up for, against the absolute abuse and mistreatment of people in this country, the lawlessness of this campaign, of this mass deportation, detention campaign, and so on. And to me, that is a winning proposition, whether you're a Democrat running in a purple district or a Democrat running in a solidly blue district. And I think now, particularly in the wake of what happened in Minneapolis, the abuses were so over the top that I do think Democrats can push for certain measures that won't change any of the big substantive policies coming out of ICE or coming out of this administration. But, for instance, think about the fact that it's taken this long for Democrats to line up against the idea that ICE agents can be masked all the time. You know, ICE agents were not masked during the first Trump administration. They were not masked during the Biden administration. They were not masked during the pandemic. So the idea that, like, politically, it's somehow seen as risky or controversial or anti law enforcement to demand that law enforcement agents who are armed, who can make arrests without having to offer any justification, who the government is claiming have total immunity against consequences from their actions, can just be completely unidentifiable by the public. That seems crazy to me. And that puts the US in the company of. Of repressive societies. It took a while for Democrats to even mark out a position on that. And so one of the striking things, when you saw the list of congressional Democrats, demands for oversight related to this particular partial shutdown, some of the items on that list are things that are basically facts of US Law. Like, one of the negotiating points was US Citizens can't be arrested by ice. No shit. I mean, that's the definition. In order to enter a private residence, you need to have a judicial warrant. Yeah, that's the Fourth Amendment. And so Democrats, if they shy away from these fights, I don't know what they're left trying to defend. I don't know. There's also so much happening. It's such a surreal moment. I mean, here there's this partial government shutdown. I don't know, you have to remind yourself that that's going on, given everything else that's happening. And so I don't know kind of how to game that out as a matter of political strategy. You know, like part of the idea of shutting down the government, whether partially or fully, is to try to attract attention to an issue. And now there are so many other things. How do you get anyone to pay attention?
- [49:22]
A
I mean, given how long it's taken for Democrats to rally around what seem like almost like low stakes reforms. I mean, low stakes in terms of the stakes for asking for them are pretty low, even though they're high stakes for the people on the ground who are kind of having to confront them. I guess I'm just wondering, like these rallying cries of abolish ice. And just like this progressive dream of there being a future in which this, this isn't how we go about immigration policy, is that just not ever something we're going to see? Let's say that the Democrats take back the White House and the whole country is just sort of like disturbed by what they've seen during the second Trump administration. Do you see any path forward for getting rid of ICE or drastically weakening it? We've seen a lot of other, you know, agencies get destroyed during the Trump administration. It makes you wonder.
- [50:07]
B
Yeah, it's a really good point. You know, that was always the abolish I stuff, always seemed like a red line that, you know, sort of moderate Democrats were never comfortable even approaching. I have to say that one of the patterns in this administration has been such systematic, unconscionable abuse that I actually think people are much more alive to the idea that, okay, these agencies in this department cannot go on existing as they currently exist. And I do think that there are very serious questions, by the way, about, okay, I don't want us to get ahead of ourselves. Let's assume that Democrats retake Congress, say, or let's assume that a Democrat wins in 2028. What does that mean for an agency like ICE? I mean, how do you then build back up legitimacy or safeguards that have been systematically gutted? What do you do with a workforce where, I mean, we haven't even spoken about this, where they've gone and hired 10,000 agents, or they're going out to hire thousands of agents and there aren't even background checks that they're doing on some of these agents. And, you know, there have been reports from an ICE whistleblower that, you know, in the training academies, they're, like, not teaching basic constitutional principles. And so that's how you get the idea that, like, these agents feel like they can go into someone's house without a judicial warrant, like, oh, there goes the Fourth Amendment. How do you begin to claw that stuff back?
- [51:26]
A
You have to, like, purge the entire ICE deep state.
- [51:28]
B
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I really. So I don't. From an institutional perspective, I don't know what you build out of the rubble of all of this. And politically, that's such an open question. And it's funny from my perspective. I watched Democrats. I mean, we all watch Democrats in 2020, but more specifically, I would say in 2024, really building the presidential race around the idea of the rule of law and the future of democracy. And I think it was widely seen that the immigration issue was a point of weakness for Biden and for Harris. And as you can imagine, I have all kinds of thoughts on that. And I actually think that, like, the kind of political read on that is a little bit off. But there was this idea that, okay, we have to separate these. We have to keep these issues as far away from each other as possible. We have to talk about our kind of key issue, which is, like, the future of democracy, which is like a little bit of an abstract issue to build a campaign around. And then the immigration stuff, like, let's just kind of hope that we can kind of weather the storm. Sure. Voters don't think we're trustworthy on this, but we'll roll the dice. If there's one thing that the current administration is showing, it's that those two issues are inextricable. And I think to people who have followed this, and this isn't a novel interpretation of mine, but to people who follow this, the administration's consolidation of power, its desire to just carry out authoritarian policies in this country, has run through the immigration space that has always been the laboratory for this administration for all kinds of reasons. I mean, it's axiomatic in history, you know, to obviously identify an other, to identify a kind of villain and to make people scared of that population and so on. But also, the President has typically enjoyed wider latitude in terms of his power on immigration policy. So it's like the lines are a little blurrier, and Democrats have typically been on their back foot when it comes to this issue. And so for all of those reasons, the immigration space has always been ground zero for this administration's authoritarian takeover of the country. And so Democrats, it seems to me, should have some vocabulary for describing that nexus, whether it's the idea that a Black Hawk helicopter is landing on an apartment complex in Chicago while ICE agents are making arrests inside. Maybe that's the image that Democrats need to campaign on. But, but the idea is that when you have people who are getting arrested without due process, who have legal status and who are being held incommunicado in prisons far away from their home state, I mean, it's ringing all of the bells. And so there's gotta be some political language for connecting those two, despite Democrats general allergy to talking about immigrants.
- [54:20]
A
Well, thank you so much for being here, John. I've really enjoyed talking to you about, you know, some really dark stuff. Although I was glad that we, we got to focus on Gnome's outfits for, for just a little bit.
- [54:30]
B
Me too. Thanks for having me.
- [54:31]
A
Yeah. Thank you so much. Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer for the New Yorker. You can find his latest piece, Kristi Noem's fireable offenses, @newyorker.com this has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Tyler Foggatt. This episode is produced by John Lemay with mixing by Mike Kutchman and engineering by Pran Bandy. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next Wednesday.
- [55:08]
B
From prx.