Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: Immigration and Deportation in the Trump Administration
Filmed July 16, 2025
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, I am Bill Kristol. Welcome back to Conversations. I’m very pleased to be joined today by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council, a genuine policy and legal expert on all things immigration. Aaron’s been a busy guy the last six months. Well, pretty busy for the last few years, honestly, right?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
Anyway, American Immigration Council is an excellent research and advocacy organization —Is that a fair thing to say? — I think that in the immigration field, and we had a very good conversation, which people should look at, which stands up well, just before inauguration about what you expected the administration to do on this signature issue of theirs. And so let’s begin with that. I mean, what have they done? What will the history books say? First six months, the Trump administration, immigration, deportation, what’s the top-lined summary? Then we’ll get into the different areas obviously.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
I think we’ve seen what the administration really telegraphed coming in, which is that immigration was going to be a top three priority, if not the top priority of the administration. And to this day, it is the thing that they have leaned into the most in public conversation about legislative priorities and administrative priorities. In fact, you saw J.D Vance use immigration as the reason that Republicans needed to pass the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the budget reconciliation bill, because of the amount of funding for immigration enforcement it had, and basically pitched all the other things which had traditionally been seen as Republican priorities, like tax cuts as secondary to immigration enforcement. And with that as their top priority, they have surged resources, manpower, and attention to immigration enforcement with the goal of massively ramping up arrests, detentions, and deportations.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, I think the J.D Vance thing was notable, and it wasn’t… Most Republicans you talked to on the hill, oh, I gather most Republicans one talks to on the hill, yeah, it was tax cuts, it was the traditional thing… Oh, it’s allegedly proving Medicaid by getting able-bodied people off or whatever, saving money, or the debt deficit and immigration was just, yeah, well that was something we’re forced, so we’re increasing it. But Vance correctly, I think from their point of view, saw that this was absolutely crucial, that the… Let’s come back to that massive increase of resources because that’s going forward past one of the most important aspects to talk about.
Are you surprised by how much of the immigration policy has been a deportation policy? I guess I’ll put it that way. Other things have happened, which you should maybe walk us through quickly in terms of cutting off, closing the border and asylum policy and all kinds of things. But certainly 85% at least of the publicity has been about the interior deportation efforts, right?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Not too surprised. And that’s in part because of the way in which we saw a Trump effect at the border. And this is something that I predicted and many others predicted, which is that we would see a very dramatic drop in migrants coming to the southern border. What I don’t think we predicted was how steep that drop would be and how sustained it would be. And there are a few different reasons for that. Some in that Trump has genuinely scared the crap out of a lot of people with the various behaviors. In addition, the Trump administration has successfully made the argument that the United States is no longer a friendly place for people who are seeking to make better lives here.
But what that’s meant is that all of the attention on enforcement has been in the interior and they have really changed how ICE has operated. Some of this was as predicted, we knew that they were going to surge manpower, bring in officers and agents from other various federal law enforcement agencies, expand detention, get rid of pro-immigrant policies, but others have been really different, are switched to quota-based enforcement. The rapid expansion of detention by thousands of people in weeks and new policies aiming to arrest people showing up for court hearings, have all supercharged the operations in ways that I think even myself and others did not predict.
BILL KRISTOL:
And the focus on criminals, which was part of the Trump message in 2024, though there was also just a flat-out mass deportation message. Remember there were those placards at the Republican convention, but there was a certain amount of rhetoric about violent criminals and stuff, that they just seemed to have thrown overboard, right? That’s not even… I don’t know if they pretend anymore that that’s a focus, but they’re deploying huge amounts of resources, as you say, to people who manifestly are not violent criminals who are showing up for their monthly appointment on whatever kind of arrangement they had to check in with the government.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. You saw at the end of May a major shift in ICE operations, which really signaled a new phase of the Trump administration’s mass deportation operations. Prior to that point, the expanded enforcement operations were still pretty standard ICE-targeted operations with the big change being an increase in the arrests of so-called collaterals. Basically, in the past, ICE would have a target list. That target list would be primarily people with final orders of removal or some form of criminal record. They would go to the house or workplace or wherever that person was, arrest that person, and then go back to the office, log the person in, potentially send them to detention, do whatever further processing. With collateral arrests, they go to that person’s—
BILL KRISTOL:
These were actual individuals, they had the name of someone who had committed a crime or had a final deportation order and so forth.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah, and crucially, that is the way ICE has operated for decades. They have a list that is millions of people long of people that they could potentially arrest, people that they know are in the United States or believe are in the United States who are removable in some way. And when you’ve got a list that long, you have to pick and choose who to target. And in the past that meant that they would pick and choose people with criminal records.
And with collateral arrests, you go to the house to pick up that one specific person, John Doe, and then you question every other person in the house. If those people are also undocumented, you arrest all of them too. And with the Trump administration, it wasn’t just that. It was on the drive over, you see somebody who maybe looks a little funny in this case, which just means somebody who looks like an immigrant or a street vendor, maybe you question that person too, or you’re hanging around outside someone’s house for hours waiting for them to come out. You start questioning the neighbors on their way to work. And all of that though was still within the framework of targeted arrest operations.
But what happened in May is Stephen Miller pulled 25 ICE field office directors and 25 ICE Homeland Security investigations field office directors into a room, screamed at them and said, “Business as usual is over. Stop focusing on people with criminal records. I want you to hit numbers.” And one thing he said is, “Who among us doesn’t think they can go out into Washington DC and arrest 30 people right now?” Or he said, “Go to Home Depot. Go to these places where undocumented immigrants are going to be congregating and just grab them. We don’t care who they are, find them, arrest them, get the numbers up.”
And that has led to a total shift in ICE operations and new practices that the agency has never done before. That has led to, in many ways, the kind of unrest and backlash that a lot of us predicted would happen finally emerging.
BILL KRISTOL:
It is amazing, just from a White House point of view, having worked there many years ago. And did… the Deputy Chief of staff to the President is not having a meeting with the Secretary of Homeland Security or the director of ICE, or even maybe down one or two tiers, the deputy, whoever’s in charge of… it must be a deputy for enforcement, various titles, whatever they have, and the head of the border patrol and so forth. He’s calling in, you say, what? A couple of dozen of regional directors.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
- Every single field office director for ICE Enforcement and removal operations and Homeland Security Investigations, which are the two major components of ICE.
BILL KRISTOL:
And as you say, yelling at them, and basically giving them a quota and all that is pretty astonishing. It’s not illegal exactly at all, I guess. I don’t think it is, but it does show just how central this is to their agenda. And that their agenda became, always was, I suppose, but really became much more explicitly numbers and getting these people out of the country and scaring everyone else out of the country, both scaring other people from coming in and scaring other people to leave.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
And the fear is a major and intended aspect of this because along with this increase in these large scale arrest operations or changes in policies that let them pick up so-called low-hanging fruit, like people attending their court hearings, people who are complying has come the performative public outrages, the kinds of extraordinarily unusual, harsh, and in my opinion, non-American tactics of things like the CECOT deportations, taking people and sending them to foreign prisons to rot, or having never been tried for anything, having no judge ever confirmed they’re member of a gang.
And those have been these very public operations that send fear through communities and that’s the intent, but also are not actually producing major numbers. So much attention has been paid to the Alien Enemies Act deportations to El Salvador where people are imprisoned without trial held incommunicado away from the world and their loved ones with not even proof of life. But there’s only about 300 people there that we’ve sent.
Similarly, the Trump admin spent a ton of attention and public opinion, took something all the way up to the Supreme Court about deporting people to South Sudan. They wanted to send people to Libya, and now they’ve sent people to Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, and that is in Grand total, 12 people. So those operations get a ton of press and they send a message to the communities, which is things will be really bad for you if you don’t leave. But they are actually not producing very large numbers.
So the bigger impact is actually on fear and the impact on communities about thinking, “Well, maybe that could happen to me.” And the admin very explicitly wants people to think that because they want to push self-deportation.
BILL KRISTOL:
But the domestic tensions, which are in much higher numbers presumably do also instill fear. And those are actual numbers. I mean, real people are being kept in various detention centers and as you say, snatched from Home Depot parking lots or whatever. And just on that, I’m not a lawyer, and I guess immigration law is not like laws applying to… Laws about the border are very, very different from laws about internal, about how things work inside the country, obviously. I mean, people come across the border, they don’t have the same rights when they’re 50 feet into this country as they do—snd they’re apprehended—as they would, as you and I presumably would if we were walking down the street of Washington D.C and someone pulled us over and they’d have to give us, I don’t know what, 48… They release us in 48 hours if they don’t charge us and we get to call a lawyer and all the normal kind of fourth Amendment, et cetera stuff and statutory stuff that exists in the US and exists in states and localities.
They don’t have that at the border. I guess undocumented immigrants don’t have that to some degree inside the country either, though they do have some rights, obviously. Not so obviously in the Trump administration. But still, I guess I’m struck by the fact that they can just pick someone off in LA— it’s not on the border, It’s 100 miles from the border—the person is not committing a crime and isn’t really charged with s crime. And is reporting under what arrangement he or she made as an undocumented person, but also got some waiver or something to check in. Is that the right way to think about it? I suppose every month.
So he or she’s on the books of the government. There’s no charge of crime. The person’s working, paying taxes, so forth, has a family or whatever. Might well have kids who are citizens and so forth. I guess the law is that person can just be snatched and put in a detention facility hundreds of miles from where he or she lives, and then with very limited recourse and ability to appeal and get a hearing and so forth?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. Unfortunately, the law does allow that kind of what I’m calling rearrests. And in fact, if you look at the laws and regulations as applied to people who are already in some sort of process with ICE or with the immigration courts, the law says that ICE does have the authority to re-detain people. So people who are previously arrested and then released on some form of order of supervision or bond, ICE is authorized to take those people back into custody.
That is distinct from going to a Home Depot parking lot and simply grabbing everybody and demanding to see their papers. And we saw a federal judge in Los Angeles find that the Border Patrol and ICE were engaged in racial profiling unlawfully when they were doing those kinds of acts. And I think when we look at the people who are being arrested, who are complying with ICE, the ones that ICE knows about, has their name, and is going to the court to arrest these specific people as they show up at their court hearings, they are on much firmer legal grounds of their ability to do that than when it is you are looking at the Home Depot parking lots.
That is not to say that it is perfect. There are actually regulations on revocation of orders of supervision that are just flagrantly ignored. That’s not new to the Trump administration. Those regulations have kind of been flagrantly ignored for many, many years. But that was always a smaller situation. This was not a common occurrence.
So now that it’s happening en masse, you are getting more people seeing that this kind of thing is going on. Whereas in the Home Depot parking lot, those are not people that ICE knows about or border patrol or whoever’s doing the kind of roving patrols like we’re seeing in Los Angeles. And I think that is a major shift because that is the kind of indiscriminate enforcement just going and grabbing people, which is I think a better use of the term grabbing people is what’s happening in Los Angeles than at the courts where it’s sort of technically re-detaining. And that is definitely according to this judge unlawful, because it’s very clear targeting. When somebody crosses the—
BILL KRISTOL:
Well it’s only unlawful if they… A, we don’t know if that’ll be upheld, and B, only probably holds for that area for now. It doesn’t mean that if they go seize people in Wichita, it’s unlawful. And C, obviously, they could probably structure things so they’re not doing racial or ethnic targeting. They’re just going in and seizing, or they could say they are, and it would be a little hard to prove. And I guess what I am still struck by is that’s a particular thing you can’t do by this civil rights laws and the Constitution nstop that.
But the sweeping up people and asking for their papers, and let’s just assume they were doing it in a race-blind way or something, an ethnic-blind way, and asking for your papers. If you don’t have them, if you’re undocumented, they can just lock you up with pretty limited… That’s what I guess I am a little… I had not realized that, that they’re in the Everglades somewhere these people, and I don’t know, treated pretty… They don’t have the normal rights that… Well, certainly that Americans have, but even a foreign visitor who came in on a visa strolling down the streets of Miami or LA, right? I mean, you can’t just snatch those people.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
They could also be arrested if somebody finds that they are violating some form of immigration law. And that’s the thing, immigration law is extraordinarily harsh, and there are a lot of things that are permitted in immigration law that are not permitted in criminal law. When you look at some of the specifics, a lot of those do date back to the 1980s and 1990s, the tough on crime era and the War on Drugs when Congress passed a number of laws mandating detention for certain people, including recent border crossers and really supercharged the enforcement authorities of then INS now DHS and authorized a lot of these actions.
But fundamentally, immigration enforcement officers have the legal statutory authority to question anybody that they reasonably believe is an immigrant, a non-citizen, and they can question them about their immigration status. And if they are deemed not to… If there’s reasonable suspicion, basically probable cause that they’re in violation of some immigration law, they can be arrested and detained.
Now, the law only says they can be arrested and detained without a warrant if they are expected to flee. But DHS just routinely interprets that as if you’re undocumented, you are per se expected to flee. And that interpretation is one of the reasons that the judge ruled that the policies that of what DHS is doing in Los Angeles is unlawful because they were not even caring about that. They just said, “If you’re undocumented, we’re arresting you. We’re not going to make any assessment of reasonable likelihood of flight. We’re just arresting everybody.” And you’re right though, these are things that we would not accept as applied to citizens, but immigration law permits it and really has permitted it for over a century.
BILL KRISTOL:
And it does seem that recently there’s been reporting that some of these particularly high profile arrests of graduate students or whatever, people who were writing anti-Israel op eds or something, those were not just randomly that they happened upon such a person that it sounds like I didn’t one ICE agent say he’d never before been ordered to arrest a particular person in this way, not because of convicted of manslaughter and we gotta get that person out of the country or even anything, right? No evidence, I don’t believe, of violating visa or other requirements. So someone didn’t like their op-ed— what’s the story with that?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Those are a different category of what the admin is doing, and that sort of fits in their other broader idea of ideological screening and purging those immigrants who don’t fit within their defined ideological beliefs. The idea that immigrants are here as a privilege and if we don’t like what they’re doing, even if what they’re doing is protected free speech, we can kick them out. And so you see that with Rümeysa Öztürk, the woman who wrote an op-ed and did nothing else. Only thing the government has ever said that she did wrong was write an op-ed that they disagreed with, that they claim was anti-Semitic.
BILL KRISTOL:
She was otherwise here legally as a student. Correct. Filled out the right forms to be at Tufts or whatever it was.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
She had had no violations at all. Yeah. There has been no allegation that she did anything other than write an op-ed that they believe was anti-Semitic and they said, “We are just going to arrest these people.” And they went and they used a website, put forward Canary Mission that had lists of people that were allegedly non-citizens in the country who were being anti-Semitic. They ordered Ice Homeland Security Investigations to go over all 5,000 names on that website. They put together a “Tiger Team,” they called it, to examine all the names and lists, see who to target. And then they basically ordered ICE Homeland Security Investigations agents. These are, by the way, the ICE agents that are not normal immigration agents. The agents who do things like going after child predators online, breaking up drug rings, real criminal law enforcement. And they said, “No, what we are actually going to have you do is just go pick up this person who we just don’t like what they wrote.”
And that is a totally distinct thing from the other kinds of immigration operations they’re doing. And you’ve seen now multiple federal judges say, “This is very obviously unconstitutional. You cannot say, ‘We’re going to point at you because we don’t like what you said and deport you because of that. You haven’t done anything wrong. We all agree you have violated not a single law, but we just don’t like what you said and we want to kick you out.'” And federal judges have been saying over and over and over again that that is unconstitutional.
BILL KRISTOL:
But if you want to deter such people from coming and want to have a chilling effect, maybe you don’t want to go through that and wait for… Hope that you get a good district court judge who agrees with that and hope that that’s upheld on appeal. And meanwhile, probably your fellowship or something is frozen or suspended. They don’t care that much. I believe they regard losing some court cases as part of the cost of doing business and pursuing their agenda.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
And right now there is an ongoing trial where the American Association of University Professors has sued the government over this policy because of the chilling effect that it’s having on higher ed. You have people, even U.S. citizens, people with green cards, people with student visas saying, “I am too afraid to speak my mind, to use my First Amendment rights to speak up about an issue that I believe strongly in because I think that if I say the wrong thing, the government is going to try to punish me for this.” And there is a trial right now in front of a Reagan-appointed judge about whether or not this policy should be blocked. And that is where this testimony has come out about ICE officers being ordered from on high to go after specific people who hadn’t violated any crime, who had their visa stripped because the government didn’t like what they said.
BILL KRISTOL:
Kind of amazing. So two more questions and then you can add other things, of course, about the first six months, basically, so how we’ve gotten to where we are. One is just to get back to the mass deportation side. Give a sense of the quantity. Obviously quantity is, what do they say? Quantity can be a quality. How much of an increase? Is it incremental increase? Are we talking orders of magnitude? You say that in, was it May, that there was this fundamental shift in strategy. And just give a sense of the numbers there if that makes sense. And then secondly, in some of these other areas, just quickly, asylum, temporary protected status, some of the other just categories really, how much have things changed? A little less than we expected or pretty radically as well?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Well, I want to start with the second one because that’s the one we have the most information on. Temporary protected status had been used heavily by the Biden administration. When Biden took office, there were about 300,000 people who had temporary protected status, with the largest group being Salvadorans, who’ve had TPS since 2001. And then the rest being about 50,000 Hondurans and Nicaraguans who’ve had TPS since 1998 and about 50,000 Haitians that had had TPS since 2010. And then a few thousand, maybe 10, 15,000 from some other smaller countries. When Biden left office, there were over a million people who had TPS. So a major shift with the biggest being Venezuela and Haiti. The Trump admin has moved in and is moving to terminate virtually all of these TPS grants. They have terminated TPS for Venezuela, Haiti, Nepal, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Honduras and Cameroon. And they are doing so not on arguments, in some of these cases, that the conditions have improved in their home countries. They are simply saying, “We don’t like TPS and don’t think it’s in the national interest to do so.”
So for Haiti, for example, Haiti of course is in dire straits as a country. The situation there has deteriorated rapidly over the last few years. Despite a multinational force arriving from Kenya last year to restore order, order has not been restored. In fact, the situation is getting worse. And so, if you look at their official explanation for ending TPS, they just say, “We don’t like it.” Basically it boils down to, “We don’t think Haitians should have TPS.” And that’s it. They don’t say that the situation has improved, though in a DHS press release, they did lie and claim that Secretary Noem terminated TPS because conditions in Haiti had improved. But you had a DHS press release saying, “Things have gotten better in Haiti.” And then when you actually looked at the official notice of why TPS was terminated, there was nothing in there. And they confirmed the situation was still terrible. They just said, “We don’t want to do it anymore.”
BILL KRISTOL:
So far, they’ve been able to do that, and I suppose courts will be reluctant to say, “Well, we’ve studied… We’re going to second guess an executive branch determination about what the situation is on the ground in some foreign country.”
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
That is a challenge, certainly. And though that said, every single district court decision so far to look at TPS has ruled against the admin. But the Supreme Court, in one of their unexplained shadow docket decisions, overturned one of those lower court decisions and let the Trump administration kick 300,000 Venezuelans off of TPS. And there are an additional about 600,000 people who are currently looking at losing their legal status. So when we get to numbers, because that was your first question here, the biggest impact on numbers so far by the Trump admin has been in the de-documenting of people who had legal status and who have lost it.
In total, when you look at upcoming pending TPS terminations and ones that have already gone into effect and termination of humanitarian parole, the Trump admin has either already stripped a million people of legal status or will be stripping those million people of legal status in 2025. So 2025 alone, we are looking at a million people being de-documented by the Trump admin and essentially rendered undocumented immigrants. And that has been, so far, the single biggest numerical impact on the immigrant population in the United States. Much larger than the number of people arrested—
BILL KRISTOL:
And most of that happened in… There don’t seem to have been much in the way of, I don’t know, enforcement against them yet, maybe is that the right way to say it? I don’t have the impression that in the huge Venezuelan areas in southern Florida, there’s been the kinds of raids you’ve seen in LA?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. And this is what I mentioned before. When you actually strip people of status, it’s not like they’re suddenly magically deported. Now, many people have chosen voluntarily to leave. There were really heartbreaking stories about some of the people who lost their humanitarian parole. In Virginia, a beloved local music teacher who was teaching music to elementary school students for a couple of years who had come here from Venezuela through one of the Biden admin’s humanitarian parole programs—so in the country legally had not violated a single law, working legally—lost his status, left and I believe moved to Spain. Took his talents and left because he lost his status. And there are plenty of people in that situation who could leave and who did have other options and have left.
But for the Haitians, for example, who’ve lost status, they’re not going back to Haiti. Going back to Haiti could be a death sentence. So many of those people have applied for asylum, sought to move to some other status and have essentially been thrown into an even more precarious limbo by losing that status, which gave them at least a little bit of permanence for now while they tried to find some other way to go forward with their lives. And that’s been the biggest impact so far before we get to enforcement.
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, it gave them some legality. We knew who they were. They were checking in on TPS. You’re right, they’re now underground, what’s the term we use?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. We’ve taken a population of people… With TPS, it’s important to understand, to get temporary protected status, you have to pass a background check. You have to go to the government, put yourself forward, get fingerprinted, make sure the government knows who you are. Every 18 months, if the status is renewed, if TPS is renewed, you have to go through that whole process again. So people with TPS are in some ways the single most scrutinized group of immigrants in the country, the people who have to be re-fingerprinted and have their background check rerun every 18 months if it’s extended. And we’ve taken that population and said basically, “If you don’t leave, you’re all becoming undocumented where we won’t know what’s going on with you. And maybe if you are encountered by ICE when we’re out and about and they’re doing these big broad arrest operations, then you’ll get arrested.” But you’ve basically been taken from the formal economy and a position of being in the government’s awareness to shoving them underground and into the shadows.
BILL KRISTOL:
And on the other side, on the detention side, what kinds of numbers are we looking at there?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Here as well we’ve seen a major increase in enforcement. Now, crucially, deportation numbers total, when you look at everything that the U.S. government does, maybe are still not as high as the Biden years. And that’s because most of the Biden deportations were border deportations. So with the border numbers down, overall deportations are down. But that is not the same thing as saying that the Trump admin is not massively ramping up the deportation infrastructure. And realistically, if you look at the actual numbers of deportations from the interior, which the government hasn’t really provided, but we have some sense of them from looking at deportation flights, we are looking at a 30 to 40% increase in deportations. Deportation flights have gone up dramatically. The Trump admin is arresting more people than really at any point we’ve seen in a very long time. They hit a daily arrest record once they started this courthouse arrest policy, which again, juicing the numbers a little bit because those are rearrests of people who are already checking in. But we are seeing a pace of enforcement unlike anything we’ve really seen in decades.
And they are doing that so far because they’ve pulled in thousands of federal law enforcement officers from other federal agencies to do immigration. So you have FBI agents, including FBI counterterrorism agents being reassigned to immigration enforcement. You have ICE Homeland Security Investigations, which I mentioned before is the criminal law enforcement side of ICE that really used to focus on drug traffickers, child predators, online crimes, things like that, they are being reassigned to do immigration enforcement instead. You’ve got the DEA has had to send hundreds of agents to ICE to work with them. The ATF. The IRS is sending special examiners who work on financial crimes to go out and arrest random migrants. Even the U.S. Postal Inspection Service is sending their police to help ICE with these raids. And all of that has produced the much greater numbers of arrests that we’ve seen, really that’s allowed them to almost double their arrest operations in the last few months through bringing in all these other agents.
BILL KRISTOL:
And the detentions that we read about are presumably on course to deportation, right? That’s the point of the detention.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah, detention has skyrocketed.
BILL KRISTOL:
And the number of people who are detained, and that’s tens of thousands of people who are currently detained, right?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. So right now, there’s about 57,000 people in detention. And to give you some sense of how big an increase that is, when Trump took office, it was about 39,000 people in detention. So they have increased… That is the average daily population. So of course, it’s not like those are the same people who are being held back then are being held now. They cycle people through these beds very quickly. So right now, about 57 to 59,000 people are being held in detention. And that is at a time when Congress still has only appropriated funding for 41,500 beds. So they pulled about a billion dollars from other parts of DHS to fund this expansion.
And they are also shoving people into detention centers that are not equipped to handle them. They are so overcrowded. They are arresting people so quickly that they have been having to hold people in the basement of the Los Angeles Federal Building in rooms that the lights turned off at 5:00 P.M. because they were set on a timer that they couldn’t turn off. And so there were people being held in the dark overnight without access to adequate food and water because they were being held in places that were intended for two to three hours of detention that they had run out of beds elsewhere and had to hold them there for days.
And situations like that are happening around the country. In Baltimore, they were also having people sleep on the floor of the office building. In New York City, the same thing is happening. The ICE field office there, people are stuck in random office building rooms because they can’t detain them. There’s not enough beds. And in the detention centers themselves, overcrowding is a huge problem. At one point, the Miami Krome Detention Center, which has a maximum capacity of 600 people, was holding 1,800 people. And that means—
BILL KRISTOL:
And you say that’s a huge problem, but, of course, they don’t think it’s necessarily a huge problem. They’ll get more money and they’ll build more Everglades type places. But for them, maybe it’s also a feature, not a bug. If it’s unpleasant and scares people, good.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
That is certainly part of it. And I’ll also note, they’re also just lying about the situation. They have been claiming over and over again with a straight face that there is no overcrowding. Meanwhile, you have people who have smuggled cell phones into these facilities showing videos of these people in there. You’ve got people who are being held in cells so crowded that no one can even lie down. There’s not even a bed. You have to sleep sitting up because you cannot have space to lay down. They are that overcrowded. And DHS just says, “That’s not happening. They’re all lying about it.” This is what they’re doing here.
And that point you made though about they actually are pretty happy with this, is very, very, very relevant to this because we know the single most important factor about whether somebody wins their case and gets to stay in the country under the laws that, on the books, allowing people to stay is whether or not they’re held in detention. Because people who are held in detention are held away from their lawyers, their loved ones, their facts, their jobs and their ability to fight their cases. And, when conditions are this bad, people just want to get the heck out. And so, this use of detention is encouraging people, even those with winnable cases, to simply give up and accept deportation because they don’t want to spend months in a hell hole just dealing with the pain and suffering of detention while they fight their case. And that is a major plus for the admin.
BILL KRISTOL:
Ugh. Final point about where we are, just you mentioned in passing they’ve got all these other law enforcement types. I believe they have some National Guard and military helping them too. In LA, they’ve cut back from 4,000 to 2,000, apparently they announced they would in LA I think yesterday. We’re speaking what? On July 16th. 200 Marines got sent to Florida just to help out because I guess they were a little strapped for manpower. When, six months ago, I think people I talked to, this was a red line. This would be deploying the military domestically. Obviously it happens occasionally. It happens in true crises and true massive riots, LA in ’92 and so forth. But just to do it routinely to help out ICE, or anyone else for that matter, is not done. And there are laws that constrain the military. ICE has worked its way around those. They’re not really helping arrest people. They’re helping protect ICE agents who are helping protect facilities.
But it’s striking, that initial executive order was open-ended. It didn’t specify California or LA, it was just the president gets to use the military, not when there’s evidence of riots, but when there are protests and when there’s suspicion that there’s going to be intelligence, however they put it there, information that there could be protests. Anyway, I’m very struck that we read the stories now about 200 Marines to Florida, cut back from 4,000 to 2,000 National Guard in LA, and we just think, “Okay, I guess that’s just part of the world we live in now,” where the military can be used, rather small numbers so far, but open-ended, no obvious limitations.
And in that one, the courts, couple have been queasy, but generally the courts very reluctant to second-guess the president’s commander-in-chief powers. And so I don’t know, are you as struck by as I am that this is where we are six months later. I’m not sure I would’ve expected… I would’ve expected them to wait for some dramatic, terrible moment and use that as the excuse because they would’ve thought they would’ve had to overcome so much reluctance in the system to go do that. But it feels to me like, from their point of view, that has been an easier push, an easier sell than one might’ve expected.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
I think with the military, we’re seeing really two main uses of them right now. And the first use is something that the military has done for quite a while when it comes to immigration, which is logistical support. Of course, Obama, Bush, Biden and Trump, the last four presidents in a row have all had military deployments at the southern border to assist—
BILL KRISTOL:
But at the border mostly, right/
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
With that logistical support. Exactly. And so some of what the military is doing now in the interior is similar to that. It’s transportation, it’s paperwork, it’s things that allegedly free officers, ICE officers and others to go do their other arrest tasks while the military is doing this sort of scut work in the background. But what we saw in Los Angeles is different. It’s the military being deployed as protectors for ICE during their arrest operations. And that is still one step away from the Insurrection Act and directly involving the military in law enforcement. Of course, there are many allegations that the Trump admin has already blurred that line, is violating the Posse Comitatus Act. Those are being litigated in court. But the biggest fear I think people had before he took office was the use of the Insurrection Act in directly ordering the military to do the arrests themselves. And so far we haven’t seen direct evidence of that happening. Though again, the question of what does it mean to be engaged in law enforcement if you are armed and standing next to an ICE officer while the ICE officer does the arrest, are you really not doing the law enforcement yourself if you’re just standing there acting as the armed guard? These are difficult questions. They are being litigated in court right now. But I think it also illustrates in many ways the limitations of the Trump admin so far in that they still have these manpower challenges and while they will get more staffing under the reconciliation bill, they are still limited by resources. Los Angeles is a perfect example of this. The government did release—
BILL KRISTOL:
Let’s talk about that. Let’s make the transition since you mentioned the bill. So this is where we are basically, and they’re limited now. And you should explain that. I’m sorry to cut you off there and then explain going forward how big a difference this bill will make. I think that would be very important.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. So when we look at Los Angeles, the government released some really fascinating statistics and they said since operations started in June—this was from July 10th, they’ve released a statistic—they had only arrested in Los Angeles, 2,780 people who are undocumented. So in a solid month they got 2,800 people. That is a lot of people to be sure, and that has sent enormous fear through communities. But there are 800 to 900,000 undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles total. So they have arrested less than 1% of them, less than half of 1% of the undocumented immigrant population in a month.
And at that rate, it would still take them years and years and years of these intense operations in Los Angeles to arrest and round up everybody. So that gives you some sense of, even with this massive national attention on the story, raids every single day in Los Angeles, they still didn’t even get half of 1% of the population in a month, and they’re still not going to hit their 1 million arrests and deportations a year figure. They’re definitely not hitting that this year. But with the funding in the reconciliation bill, which is $170.7 billion for immigration enforcement, about 75 billion of which goes to ICE, they are going to be able to ramp things up dramatically over the next few years.
BILL KRISTOL:
So do you have a sense of the magnitude of that? I do feel some people, I take your point about statistics, they’re that many in L.A. alone or in California? I thought the 1 million illegal undocumented immigrants was in California. So you’re saying—
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Los Angeles County alone—
BILL KRISTOL:
In the county alone.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
… has 800 to 900,000 undocumented immigrants in it.
BILL KRISTOL:
So on one hand it seems like a small number. On the other hand, one thing about numbers is when you ramp them up, you go from 30 to 50 and everyone says, “Well, that’s a big increase.” Whatever. It’s X percent, 60% increase. And as you say, but it’s still, ultimately it’s not a massive number. If there are 11 million undocumented immigrants, right? You could do the same math and say it’s less than a percent. On the other hand, A, there’s this self-deportation and side effects of the ones who were directly touched, but B, there’s also the people underestimated in my experience in life and politics. If you keep adding X tens of percent or a hundred percent every three, six months, these numbers get bigger faster than you expect. I mean, how big is this increase of money and what does it herald for possible numbers six months from now or 12 months from now?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah, to give some sense about how big of an increase, for the next four years, immigration enforcement will be the single highest funded law enforcement priority of the United States, higher than counterterrorism, higher than counter narcotics, higher than fighting child exploitation. It will be the number one federal law enforcement priority when you look at, just in sheer terms of funding. In sheer terms of funding, it’s about 27 to $28 billion a year over the next four years for ICE enforcement alone. And that is greater than the combined budgets of the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, U.S. Marshals Services, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons combined. So that will bring with it thousands of new law enforcement officers, thousands of new transportation contractors, dozens of new deportation planes and tens of thousands of new detention beds. In January, ICE estimated that they had the capacity to get about 75,000 detention beds in pre-existing facilities.
So local jails, prisons, private prisons that rent and lease out beds that if they maximize that capacity, they could hit about 75,000 people in detention. And again, going back, we’ve hit 59,000 under the Trump admin, so they could fit about 15,000, a little bit more people into pre-existing detention centers if they utilize them. And with overcrowding, probably a bit more. But anything above that is going to have to be in tent camps like what Florida has built with the Everglades Detention Camp. And we are going to see thousands of new beds come online over the next few years, potentially, likely tens of thousands of new beds coming online in these so-called soft sided facilities. And they will be in random places around the country, wherever they can find space for them. Some of them will be state operated because the bill has $3.5 billion separately for state and local governments to support ICE in their enforcement operations, and a lot of them will be, however, federally contracted with private prison companies to detain these people.
With that money, which is about an additional 10.6… When you average this funding over the next four years, though crucially, it doesn’t have to be averaged over the next four years, they can kind of spend it whenever they want. We’re looking about an average of $10.6 billion a year through the end of 2029, an addition on top of their current detention budget for detention. And that will mean tens of thousands of people being held in these soft sided facilities. And that will be huge because as I mentioned before, detention is the number one reason that people lose their cases and detention allows them to ramp up deportations dramatically. If people are out in the community attending immigration court over the course of months, able to hire lawyers, keep their jobs, be with their family and fight for their cases, they’re going to be much less likely to give up. If they’re arrested, thrown in detention away from their families in a facility like what DeSantis has built, where apparently there’s mosquitoes everywhere, it’s miserably hot when the AC isn’t working and freezing cold when the AC is working, there’s no access to lawyers, little access to phones, the food is terrible.
If it’s facilities like that, you will see people just give up because they don’t want to go through that. And that will mean deportations ramp up dramatically. It will take them time to bring all of this funding online. They cannot snap their fingers and hire 5,000 people overnight. But we’ve also seen this is an admin that’s willing to wave a lot of the normal hiring processes to get people on board. So it may not take as long as some people could expect. And we also know that the quality of candidate probably won’t be as high [as] in the past because they’re going to do lax hiring standards. We’ve seen one hiring binge like this before. In the late 2000s, the Bush administration hired 10,000 border patrol agents. They went from, at the start of the Bush admin, about 10,000 border patrol agents to a little bit over 21,000 in 2008.
And most of that hiring occurred in Bush two. What happened is they hired people so fast, they waived all the standards, cut polygraph things that they actually had a bunch of cartel operatives got hired on and ended up running drugs out of the border patrol because they cut the standards so much and didn’t do all the required background checks. And it took them years to adjust to that and fundamentally reshaped the agencies. So even if all of that money goes away four years from now, and those officers are still on board and they have to find some other way to keep them on board, the institutional culture of the agencies is never going to be the same with that kind of infusion of hiring and resources.
BILL KRISTOL:
Wow. No, I think that whole side of the, just the pure money stuff has such an impact. Everyone wants to talk—I do too—legal cases and theories and what are their intentions? But just at some point the massive resources which directly and then indirectly, right, because they now can put much more pressure on local police forces, I should think to cooperate. There’s also a lot of political pressure directly from Trump, obviously against people who might otherwise have been at sanctuary or semi sanctuary cities or police forces that didn’t not cooperate, but didn’t really cooperate much either.
People have underestimated, my sense is, the degree to which sustained Steve Miller level coercion—pressure—from the White House can affect the overall way in which the country deals with immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, but not only immigrants, also just people who are American citizens who look like immigrants, if you know what I mean. I do think that’s… I feel those kinds of changes, the ripple effect could be pretty great, I should think.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
And Florida is a prime example of this. Not only is Florida using government money to build and operate this detention center, but they are still maintaining custody. You’re also seeing the Florida Highway Patrol really being used as an arm of ICE. And you look at what’s happening in Florida right now, how are people getting sent to the Everglades Detention Camp, the so-called Alligator Alcatraz? Well, it’s mostly people who are being picked up by the Florida Highway Patrol for traffic offenses. In fact, a third of the people being sent there, again, this is a facility they claimed would be for vicious psychopaths and the worst of the worst, a third of the people being sent there have no criminal convictions at all. And those who have some sort of interaction with the criminal justice system, it’s often driving on a suspended license, driving without a license, traffic offenses.
And what we’re seeing happen is Florida Highway Patrol has very clearly increased its use of pretextual arrests. One person sent there said their lawyer talked to the Miami Herald, and their lawyer said when their client got pulled over by the Florida Highway Patrol, the lawyer got on the phone with the Florida Highway Patrol officer saying, “Hey, my client is an asylum seeker. He’s got a work permit, he’s going through court. What’s going on here? Why are you doing this?” And the Florida Highway Patrol agent officer told the lawyer, “We are sending everyone who looks Hispanic to be screened by Customs and Border Protection.”
And so they are just using Florida Highway Patrolmen as part of the mass deportation operation to funnel people into this facility. And things like that are going to be replicated in other states. They’re going to be replicated in Florida, sorry, in Texas, they’re going to be replicated in a whole bunch of GOP states around the country and also probably some blue communities because the funding that ICE can now offer will be a boon to local law enforcement. There might be millions of dollars in it for local police departments, which do that kind of thing.
BILL KRISTOL:
But on the other hand, it does seem like they targeted not the red states first. I mean, it can’t be an accident, and Trump said it incidentally, it’s like, “We’re going after L.A., it’s a Democratic state, it’s a bunch of socialists. Karen Bass is horrible,” whatever. So people I’ve talked to in red states, I would say, haven’t seen… T hese are the people, I’m not talking to people who are undocumented immigrants themselves or probably relatives of them. So I feel like there hasn’t been quite as much impact on public opinion at least, and public sense of what’s happening in the red states. How much do you think this is a blue state, red state thing? How much do you think just to get the numbers, they’re going to have to go to the red states eventually? And also, I suppose the red state governors, maybe they don’t want their people to be too upset. On the other hand, they want the money and they also sort of agree with the agenda to some degree.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. Red states, I mean, it’s important to note red states have not been immune from this. What’s happening in Los Angeles is a very deliberate operation from the Trump admin to go after Los Angeles because of their sanctuary status. And of course for people need to understand sanctuary policies are not some kind of anti-ICE force field, they’re policies of non-cooperation. And so Tom Homan has been saying since the transition and before, “If you don’t cooperate, that means we have to go into your communities to do these kind of at-large arrest operations.” And so in Florida, which is cooperating, in many ways the people doing those at-large arrest operations are the Florida Highway Patrol. It’s not ICE. And they are armed officers badges, uniforms. They are police. And so it’s not as visible as a bunch of masked men running in and grabbing somebody and shoving them into a van with the license plate taken off, which is what has been happening in Los Angeles.
But nevertheless, the arrests are still happening. It’s just Florida Highway Patrol pulling over Hispanic drivers for seatbelt violations or window tints or pretty clearly pretextual stops, and yet the arrests are happening. In addition, we are seeing in red states large-scale worksite enforcements, which has been a major shift under the Trump admin as well and is happening nationally. In Louisiana, in Mike Johnson’s district, they raided a racetrack and arrested dozens of stable hands who had been working to care for horses. In Omaha, they raided a meatpacking plant. And that meatpacking plant, incidentally, used E-verified, it’s just that many of the workers had false identities. And so you are actually seeing raids on workplaces in red states, but you aren’t seeing the kind of masked men grabbing people to the same degree. And that is largely because they are targeting those at blue cities. Some of that I will note is just because that is where the immigrants are.
There is a large part of that. The undocumented immigrant population is most heavily concentrated in urban areas. And because it’s most heavily concentrated in urban areas, urban areas tend to be blue, and therefore they tend to be more likely to have sanctuary policies and therefore more likely to be targeted by ICE. But a lot of it is very clear targeting by the admin and with the funding and the reconciliation bill, you might see what’s happening in Los Angeles expand to Chicago, expand to New York, expand to D.C., expand to Philadelphia, expand to all of these blue cities, which have been very publicly resistant of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda so far.
BILL KRISTOL:
And so, I don’t know, six months from now, 12 months from now, you pick up, 18 months, what’s the most reasonable timeframe here? Give a couple. All in, you got the Trump administration… Well, A, do you think the Trump administration continues to push as hard as it has? B, the resistance, I mean the courts and others who have sort of been barriers or at least speed bumps on this path…Where do you think they end up? Net-net, where are we a year from now in terms of how things look in this country?
And I’m particularly interested in the TPS. I mean, if these people are all now undocumented, and will become that over the next year, some of that is the Biden administration, as I understand it, timespan running out 18 months or whatever, pretty hard to go to court and say Trump has to extend it if he doesn’t want to, since it’s a discretionary executive choice, however disingenuous their reason for not doing it is. Well just where do you think we are? What does it look like in 12 months?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah, I mean, I think in 12 months because of the TPS terminations, the undocumented population is actually bigger than it is today. But I also think ICE enforcement has ramped up even further. We are seeing more Los Angeleses, we’re seeing not 59,000 people in detention, potentially 79,000, 99,000 people in detention. Because as we saw in the Florida facility—
BILL KRISTOL:
And cycling through detention to get deported.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Right.
BILL KRISTOL:
I mean, these people are, it’s not like jails where to some degree you have a five-year term. You can say there’s 42,000 people in jail and most of them are going to be in jail next year because they’re serving more than 12 months prison. That’s not the case here.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
And I think that’s really—
BILL KRISTOL:
A little misleadingly low actually, in a funny way, right? I mean…
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah, of those, if it’s 79,000, 99,000 people in detention, there could be hundreds of thousands of people who have cycled through those detention beds. Many of them are still going to be fighting their cases. Not everybody’s going to give up, but you are going to just see the pace of deportations increase dramatically, maybe double or triple by a year from now, but it will still take some time to get it. And I’m more looking at three years from now of things looking really transformatively different.
How that looks nationally though. Trump’s support on immigration is plummeting in nearly every poll because these kind of operations are really not what he ran on. Yes, of course, mass deportation now signs at the RNC, Trump saying on the campaign trail, “I’m going to kick them all out.” It’s not just the criminals. But during the transition period, and really during the campaign itself, all the focus was on people with criminal records. And no one on the Trump campaign said, “What we’re really going to have happen six months in is masked people grabbing street vendors.” That is, again, it’s a cliche. That’s not what people voted for because plenty of people did vote for that. But by and large, the sort of Biden-Trump voters, the middle did not vote for that. They didn’t think that was going to happen. And even a lot of the Trump voters, those with undocumented family members who are now seeing those family members arrested, they didn’t think that was going to happen.
They thought, they were spun a story that Biden let in millions of criminals and that Trump is going to come in and clean out all those criminals. But that’s just not what happened. And there aren’t millions of undocumented criminals in the United States. Most undocumented immigrants live fairly normal lives, going to work, going to church, feeding their families, living lives that look pretty similar to those who do have papers. And that is creating an enormous amount of backlash.
BILL KRISTOL:
And how powerful is that—
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
And I’m very worried how that’s going.
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, just on that backlash, two questions. You’re worried about it, I take it that may be on the sort of resistance and violence side and how that plays out.
Also, I think people are being a little too… If they care enough about it, they’re not going to care that… A, they’re not so confident that it really translates into losing actual Senate races, maybe a couple of House races in 2026. But you can be pretty unpopular on an issue, but if it’s not the most salient voting issue, it doesn’t matter much. Presidentially, the administration doesn’t have to worry about things for two years at least.
And so I guess I’m a little worried that some people are… I mean, the polls are important obviously, and it’s got to have some effects on Congress and so forth. But if they believe in it, they can keep doing it for quite a while I guess is what I’m saying, right? They can pursue the Steve Miller agenda at 34% approval instead of 48% approval. It makes it harder but doesn’t stop it.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
No, and I actually completely agree with you; I don’t think this is going to stop them at all. They simply do not care what the poll numbers are. And whenever they look at them, if they’re bad for them, they just call them fake and ignore them. And so I don’t think the poll numbers are going to really shift anything. It could shift local support. I mean, in fact, you’ve already seen Democrats grow a backbone about some of this stuff and surely back off this cooperative talk about the immigration with the Trump admin. And I think that is where the polling is going to have an impact, is going to be on the middle and sort of the center left. But I am also very worried about unrest. We had in—
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, say a word about that. Say a word about that.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. In the last couple of weeks, we had a man shot and killed while he was attempting to shoot up a border patrol station. We had 11 people arrested for an attempted ambush killing outside of an ICE detention center where a local responding police officer was shot in the neck. You had an operation outside of a cannabis farm in California where a man was on video firing a handgun at DHS officers.
I am very worried someone is… Well, someone has already been killed. So far not law enforcement. So far it was an armed man with a gun who was killed, but I’m very worried about more circumstances like this. Because people see friends, loved ones, or really just they see videos of these masked men with no insignia grabbing people from unmarked vans and shoving them in their vans, and they are very worried about what that means.
And this is not unexpected of course. Every time—this is a well-known fact—if you deploy the military in a place, it’s going to lead to more unrest potentially, because just the very presence of things like that in a community makes people unhappy.
And you are seeing more and more unrest, more protests, more potential armed responses as they ramp this stuff up. And they are showing no signs of conciliatory behavior that might acknowledge why people are responding this way. In fact, they’re saying, “Anybody who disagrees with our officers acting this way is a traitor who wants ICE officers killed.”
But fundamentally, it’s a vicious cycle. The more ICE officers have legitimate fears about being doxed… I do think that is a legitimate fear that their family will be harassed for being an ICE officer. And that’s causing them to mask up, which is causing people to then want to unmask them even more, which is causing more officers to mask up, which is causing more backlash. So this is creating this cycle that is going to lead to more unrest. And of course, mass deportations in the community, impact of terror and fear also leads to that. This is also not unexpected.
In 1994, the border patrol came out with its strategy called Prevention Through Deterrence where they said, “Here’s how we’re going to get the undocumented population entirely.” They said, “First we’re going to seal off the southern border, then we’re going to seal off the northern border, then we’re going to seal off the coastal border, then we’re going to arrest and detain everybody in the interior.” That was their grand strategy of how to do this over the course of a decade or two.
And that strategy is still basically what the Trump admin is doing. And if you look at that strategy in 1994, they anticipated once the southern border was closed and they started turning their attention in the interior, there would be unrest, there would be political backlash. And all of that is occurring exactly as predicted. The question is how is this admin going to respond? And unfortunately, so far all we’ve seen from them is escalation.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, the mask stuff, I’ll let you go here in a second, is, my opinion, creepy and spooky almost. And the degree to which they didn’t… well, I take your point that there are genuine fears and worries and there are occasions where that might be legitimate, but that’s not the way they treat it. They all decided to mask up. They’re outside literally courthouses. I mean, come on, is that really a scary place? So are there are not other armed law enforcement officers in those hallways and in front of those buildings who can protect anyone if someone shows up with a gun? Or they could… Not even talking about a gun, but…
I mean, the excessive force they’re using, that does seem designed to send a message, but as you say, it leads to a backlash and then you do get things spinning out of control. And I’m old enough to remember Kent State, I guess that was my last year in high school. Terrible incident in June, was June I guess 1970, May 1970.
And then after that, I do think actually everyone took a deep breath and said, “This is really out of control and we need to dial it down.” And there were still obviously things happened in the early ’70s, but I do have the sense that everyone pulled back some, including rhetorically to some degree. And I don’t know, doesn’t feel that way now.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
No. The adults in the room who could tell them to pull things back and take a deep breath and really rethink about how they’re talking about this and… they aren’t there anymore. They’ve been kicked out. And I think that purge of competent law enforcement professionals is ongoing. People are quitting left and right from ICE, from the Department of Justice and everywhere.
BILL KRISTOL:
Say a word about that, let’s close on that. That doesn’t get as much attention. That is happening and…
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Morale is terrible because a lot of these people were hired because they wanted to go after people with criminal records, quite frankly. Again, ICE, in the past, their primary focus, their number one focus was on people with some form of criminal record.
And if you look at the people who were sent to detention after being arrested by ICE, in the last months of the Biden admin, 94% of the people had some form of criminal or pending charges who were being sent to detention by ICE. Even in the first Trump admin, it was about 90%. It’s now down to 66%.
And when you look at ICE Homeland Security investigations, the criminal law enforcement arm, they want to be going after criminals. Instead, they’re being told to raid nail salons and do I-9 audits at restaurants. This is not the stuff they want to do. And because they are having quotas imposed on them, they are in terrible, terrible straits in terms of agency morale because they’re being ordered to get up at 4:00 AM every single morning multiple weeks in a row to go on these arrest operations to pick up large numbers of people.
In fact, after that meeting with Stephen Miller in May, the head of ICE’s enforcement and removal operations, the guy running the deportation operations at ICE quit. And the reason he quit was because he was ordered to fire agents who had not hit their quotas for arrests, and he refused to do it, and he resigned rather than send that order.
So that gives you some sense of the internal feelings right now. You’ve got a bunch of law enforcement professionals, many of them who’ve been doing this job for decades who have these politicals like Stephen Miller coming in, screaming at them to hit quotas, to abandon all of their previous practices, and to just go round up mom and dad and grandma who’s out selling ice cream and fruit outside or working day labor outside of Home Depot, and that’s not what they thought they were doing.
And if they don’t hit their quotas, they’re going to potentially get fired or have terrible personnel reviews. And so those people are sort of either… They’re just considering their ways out. And we’ve already seen lots of stories of people leaving. And I have talked to liberal journalists and conservative journalists with sources inside the agencies, all of whom have said, and some have reported publicly, morale is terrible inside ICE right now.
BILL KRISTOL:
We’ll see how that plays out. It’s so much, you have to run here, and this has been such a fascinating conversation. So many other things to follow up on. We’ll have to do another one too because there are other issues too in terms of we’ll see what happens, I suppose, with the new academic year and the academics coming in and so many other…
But I do think the deportation, the centrality, I guess I’ll just close with this and you can have a final word on it obviously, I mean, the centrality of the deportation issue, the mass deportation issue, to the Trump administration’s agenda and kind of to our politics right now, that JD Vance thing has so revealed the biggest bill that Congress has passed, the biggest legislation they passed, what the administration regards as the centerpiece of it is a massive expansion of those who are carrying out the deportation agenda.
That is really… I don’t know. It says a lot, it seems to me, and it will have all kinds of ripple effects that people probably haven’t, including us, maybe haven’t even thought about, I should think, socially, culturally, and so forth.
And the rhetoric, the other point you make. I mean, it’s one thing to do some of these things in a way that’s, look, it’s unfortunate we have to do this, but it’s the right thing to do. It’s unmanageable. You can imagine a rhetoric that is different from what the rhetoric we’re getting every day from Miller and Homan and from Trump, right?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. And really, it is central to their vision of restoring a fabled American perfect society where everybody got along. And you see this with Stephen Miller and the others and JD Vance talking about it where they basically say, “Every problem that you, the American citizen, have are down to those dirty immigrants.”
Yesterday Stephen Miller said, “Minneapolis has been destroyed by immigration over the last 20 years.” They said, “All this unrest is due to immigrants.” You saw them say, “If we do mass deportations in Los Angeles, all the waiting times, that your emergency room will be better, your children will have less crowded schools, you’ll get an apartment, the jobs will be flowing.” None of that is true.
Mass deportations reduces the overall size of the economy and leads to people losing their jobs as businesses go under. Mass deportation reduces the housing supply because large percentages of the construction population are undocumented. Mass deportation increases the prices of food because large portions of the people doing our farm labor are undocumented.
And in December I testified in front of the Senate about mass deportation. What I said is we really have a choice. We can go down the path of mass deportation, kicking out millions of people who have been here for, in some cases, decades. And the end result will be a poorer country with fewer things and everything more expensive and less to go around in total.
Or we can do what the majority of the American public wants and pass a path to legal status, have Congress actually legislate on an issue for the first time in decades, and lead to a situation where we are all prospering, where a rising tide lifts all boats.
And if we go down that former path, the path of mass deportation, our lives will not be better off. But unfortunately, the admin wants to go down that path anyway and just lie to our faces about what’s happening.
BILL KRISTOL:
And to be fair, it may also be the case that you don’t see some of these downstream effects for months or a year or two or three, right? And so you don’t get the proof that one of these paths is so much worse than the other quite right away, so the way as you said, boats—
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
And they will blame whatever happens on other things, other factors. If houses get more expensive, housing prices go up because construction labor goes down, well, it’s, “There’s not enough patriotic Americans. There are Americans leeching off of Medicaid who could be doing those jobs instead.”
You’ve already seen this with Brooke Rollins saying, “We’re going to kick out all the farm workers and replace them with 35-year-olds who are playing video games in their basement.” I mean, who are they kidding? And yet, that is the political discourse right now, and that is unfortunately in it from an administration that won’t back down what I expect to see over the next few years.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s very depressing but very helpful to say. I mean, you said to me once a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about it, that this administration’s reaction is just to escalate. There’s continual escalation.
And I do think so far, despite the polls, despite some obstacles from the courts, despite presumably some of Trump’s friends calling him up and saying, “Hey, wait, I’m running a hotel here. I got a real problem.” And that leaves Trump for 24 hours to kind of pause or say he’s going to pause some of these deportations. So far at least they may be getting bugged by reality a little bit, but they’re not doing anything about it. They’re not reacting to it. They’re not changing course.
So yeah, six months from now, 12 months from now, well, we’ll have to get together six to 12 months from now, maybe even earlier though, because I think the beginning of the academic… September could be kind of interesting, I should think. There’ll be awful lot of people coming at least for academic jobs. But other people work on that cycle also in terms of businesses, right? So it’d be interesting to see sort of where we are just a few months from now, so we’ll do this again.
Aaron, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s very, very interesting and informative, if not entirely cheery.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Thank you for having me.
BILL KRISTOL:
And thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
