Today's guest on The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie is Pete Buttigieg, former secretary of transportation and already a leading, if undeclared, contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.

Buttigieg reflects on his time in government, his evolving views on federal power, and why he thinks DOGE was a good idea that was poorly executed. An outspoken critic of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Donald Trump, Buttigieg says that the use of masked agents and martial tactics against nonviolent immigrants contributes to a loss of trust and confidence among the public. That trust can be restored, he argues, through transparency and restraint.

"If you're here and you shouldn't be and you're dangerous, you've got to go," he says, "but it does not to follow from that that it's okay to see all of this abusive behavior coming from federal immigration troops…in our cities."

Gillespie and Buttigieg debate the role of government, federal spending, subsidizing high-speed rail, and the rate of social progress, and they explore possible areas of overlap between Democrats and libertarians.

0:00–ICE accountability and immigration policy
8:40–What can Democrats offer libertarian voters?
11:05–The national debt and federal spending
15:50–Automation and government efficiency
21:23–The private sector versus public benefit
26:31–Tariffs and free trade
34:20–Democratic Party failures in 2024
41:35–Identity politics
43:40–Responding to Kamala Harris' comments
46:25–Perceptions of Millennial and Gen Z voters
49:00–Republican messaging around trans people
52:23–National service and shared identity

Transcript

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: This is The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. Thanks for listening. Today I'm talking with former South Bend, Indiana, mayor and secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, one of the most visible, nationally recognized Democrats.

He's been making the rounds of colleges and podcasts and cable news shows over the past few months. He's going all over the country. My producer tells me that he's headed to New Hampshire soon, according to his mailing list. Which might be an indication that he's running for president or thinking about it.

I'm talking with him today less because he's one of the most prominent Democrats in the country, and more because he's been reaching out to libertarians on issues recently such as holding ICE accountable. Pete Buttigieg, thanks for talking to Reason.

Pete Buttigieg: Thanks a lot for having me on. Glad to be with you.

So first up, are you running for president?

I'm a long way from any kind of decision like that. But I do know that as somebody who has a level of national visibility and really cares about the issues going on in the country, that I should be speaking out, traveling, trying to reach different kinds of audiences, and that's what I'm doing.

And listening, right? You should be listening.

Yes, absolutely.

As much listening. Well, let's talk a little bit about ICE because I think you recently, about a couple of weeks ago, you had a tweet. This was after Rénee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed by ICE agents.

You tweeted, "If there was ever a moment for libertarians and conservatives to step up and join the rest of us, we're in it. Americans have to unite and stop this descent from a freedom-loving nation into the kind of place where masked, militarized government agents are sent to politically noncompliant areas to roam the streets, terrorize civilians, and deploy violence with impunity."

To which I say, absolutely I would, for the record, Reason, which has been around since 1968, we don't have house editorials, but all of our writers opposed the PATRIOT Act and then the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created DHS and ICE. What should we be doing in terms of removing illegal aliens who are in the country? Just as a kind of starting point?

Well, look, I think there is a kind of common sense consensus among most Americans, left, right, and center, that if somebody is a danger to society, if somebody has a criminal record, then they need to be dealt with. They need to be deported and/or dealt with in our criminal justice system. And I don't think there's a ton of disagreement with that. And I think a lot of people who voted for this administration did so believing that they would prioritize the most dangerous, the people with the worst criminal records. After all, they said that they would.

The challenge, of course, is we've seen something that's gone so far beyond that, where you have people who have been in this country, everything legal other than they don't have permission to be here. Everything else, paying taxes, often having work permits, doing what they're supposed to do, as well as people who are a hundred percent legal. People with some kind of asylum or refugee status. And even United States citizens, all being caught up in being on the abusive end, the business end, of this administration's immigration policy. So I think we can start with a reasonably consensus place that says that, "Look, if you're here and you shouldn't be and you're dangerous, you got to go." And not have it follow from that, that it's okay to see all of this abusive behavior coming from federal immigration troops, basically, agents in our cities.

How much is it? It's stuff like the masking and the rush to hire thousands of new ICE agents. Clearly, the training couldn't have been as good as it was going to be beforehand. You've talked a lot about this. I certainly do in my writings, about a loss of trust and confidence in government institutions. People don't trust ICE; they don't trust the police. They certainly don't trust the government or the media or the church the way that they used to. How do you go about changing ICE quickly so that people are more comfortable actually helping it do its legitimate functions?

Yeah, this breakdown of trust has obviously been going on for a long time. I think it's a huge problem. I wrote a whole book about it about 5 or 6 years ago now. And it's only become more serious since then. And I thought a lot about how trust, in particular between law enforcement and citizens, is earned, because of my time as mayor. Where I oversaw a police force, we had a lot of challenges with that police force and its relationship to the community. And part of where trust was earned was that people knew each other, the members of the community and the members of the police department. The policing worked best when people trusted those in uniform, they'll keep them safe, turned to them when they needed help, when they had information that could help solve a crime.

Was South Bend a sanctuary city by any chance?

We didn't have that kind of formal policy. We did believe that there was a distinction between what our police were supposed to be doing and what federal immigration were supposed to do. And that was important because I was very worried that if local residents thought that our police were out there conducting immigration raids, they were going to be less likely to talk to us when we needed their help to solve a crime, including a violent one.

One of the arguments for a variety of sanctuary city policies is that it actually helps with local law enforcement substantially.

But another thing is, I think it's inconceivable in at least any police department I've ever seen, that you would have your police officers at a community-level be unwilling to show their face. So that's a good starting point to think about. Shouldn't that community model have at least some relevance to what we expect from our federal law enforcement?

Another way to put it is, if we're going to give you the power to use deadly force on American soil, potentially against citizen or non-citizen alike, there's some really basic things we're going to need from you in terms of, first of all, I think showing your face and identifying yourself and having a body camera, so there's a record of what you're doing. But also of course, more deeply, a level of accountability and a level of responsibility and a level of training, of course.

How do you respond to people? Conservative critics will say, "Well, ICE is uniquely doxxed all the time. That people are following them home, that they're at a particular level of risk that no other type of law enforcement is." You hear this quite often.

I think we should approach this in a fact-based way. So what I've seen in terms of people losing their lives and being physically harmed, is that happening much more frequently to people who are being abused by ICE than to members of ICE.

But let me be clear, it is completely wrong to harm or dox ...