Filmed Feb. 11 2026
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, welcome back to Conversations. I’m BILL KRISTOL:. Very pleased to be joined again today by AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:, Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council, one of our leading experts on immigration policy, advocate, I think it’s fair to say for liberal immigration policies, using that term broadly. These days, liberal is anything to the left of, I don’t know, 1924. So it’s a very broad universe, more liberal than the Trump administration immigration policies and a lawyer, so you can explain that side of things too. So thanks for joining me, Aaron.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Thank you for having me back.
BILL KRISTOL:
And so what we’ll discuss today, I think is begin with the mass deportation issue, which is certainly the highest profile side of things and very important side of things. And then move also to legal immigration, which has gotten a little less attention, but pretty dramatic changes there too, and then how it all adds up. But we had a conversation just at the beginning, I think it was literally two or three days before the Trump administration began about what they might do. And I think it stands up well. And you anticipated I think that this would be a huge centerpiece of the Trump administration’s agenda and that we should take the mass deportation promise or threat seriously. So thank you. That stands up pretty well, I think. And what do we now know a year later?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
I think what we talked about back then, again, has mostly proceeded along the lines of what I discussed. There were a couple of major differences and things that I either missed or anticipated might happen, but we weren’t sure about. And the first big one is resources. ICE got $75 billion in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And I talked a lot in our conversation a year ago about how all of this was going to be very expensive and difficult for the government. And it turns out when you throw enough money at a problem, you actually can get things done far faster than anyone anticipates. And Congress did exactly that, which has given ICE the operational ability and resources to really ramp things up quicker than I think anyone anticipated who was not a Trump administration official who was already making these plans behind the scenes before they even got started. And the other thing is, I think I—
BILL KRISTOL:
When you say ICE, you’re including border patrol, the others as well who were involved in the internal mass deportation effort basically.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Well, that’s actually a great segue because I was about to say the other thing that I missed is the extent to which they would pull resources from other parts of the federal government. And I had spent a lot of time looking at ICE’s budget, ICE’s resources, how many officers they had on board, what kind of capabilities they had. And I think I didn’t fully anticipate the extent to which they would pull thousands of federal agents from the FBI, the IRS, the ATF, the DEA, and every other part of the federal government and throw them into the mass deportation operations, as well as the things like the use of military planes early on for deportations and detention on military basis, all of which has allowed them to ramp up the mass deportation operations significantly quicker than I think myself and many others anticipated.
BILL KRISTOL:
And give me a sense of scale here. Are we talking about it’s 50% bigger, it’s 2X, twice as big, it’s three times, I mean, both in money and humans, well, I like to call them law enforcement, but federal officers, federal agents engaged in the effort and building of detention space. Are we talking about… How steep is that ramp up?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Well, on the detention side of things, we actually just put out a new report a few weeks ago on Trump’s immigration detention expansion in his first term. And we found that just in the first year, the detention system expanded by about a little bit over 80%.
BILL KRISTOL:
Wow.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
So going from 40,000 people in Trump’s first, sorry, 40,000 people when Trump took office to about 73,000 peak in mid-January now. At the end of the month, it fell down to a little bit over 70,000. And so that gives you just some sense of scale, 75 to 80% jump in the number of people being detained on any given day, which is a massive increase, record levels. And testimony from Todd Lyons, the acting ICE director in front of Congress just a few days ago, included a really telling statistic. He said that in Trump’s first year back in office, ICE carried out about 380,000 arrests. That is not direct apples to apples comparison to previous years, which are measured in fiscal years and not calendar years.
But really, that suggests that ICE has already broken the records previously set by President Obama for internal arrests, which was 330,000 or so in 2011. So they’re already blowing past record arrests and will be ramping up even more in 2026 as they have thousands of new officers coming online thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act funding, plus an even greater ramp up in detention capacity and enforcement capability around the country.
BILL KRISTOL:
Oh, that’s very helpful. And just to finish that part, the amount of money being spent on all of this year over year is up by roughly what? And also the number of federal agents, I know it’s a little hard to calculate because they’re taking people from other agencies and they don’t always report that. But the number of people involved in this effort compared to two years ago or something like that?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
It’s a dramatic increase. If we just look at staffing numbers here, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act funding was set to give them about 10,000 new officers plus support staff. Reporting from the Atlantic suggests that they may have all of those new officers on board by the end of the year and that they already have several thousand in the training pipeline or at the stage where they finish training and are being onboarded right now. And so when they started the year, at the start of Trump’s term, there were about 6,000 detention and deportation officers and about 6,500 ICE Homeland Security investigations, special agents who are a lot more like the FBI, but on day one back in office, President Trump issued an executive order directing that HSI make immigration enforcement its number one priority above criminal law enforcement.
And so when you look at this combined then, you’re talking about we’re going to have by the end of the year, potentially around 16,000 detention officers, and those are the basic immigration enforcement officers, plus the 6,500 or so ICE Homeland Security investigations officers, thousands of whom have been redirected away from criminal law enforcement towards immigration enforcement, which may mean that they have around 20,000 or more people that are whose job it is going to be going out on the streets, arresting people, picking people up at jails and detention centers, staffing detention centers, and doing the business of mass deportation.
BILL KRISTOL:
And because of the five-year appropriations in the reconciliation bill, I hate to even give it that stupid name, Trump gave it, but in the bill that was passed last summer, that scaling up continues until through the rest of Trump’s administration, unless Congress acts to claw back some of that money.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
And so they are spending it as quickly as they can. When you average out the detention funding alone, when you add it to their annual budget, you get about $15 billion a year for detention through the end of fiscal year 2029. So that’s September 30th, 2029. So they have to spend, on average, about $15 billion a year just on ICE detention, and they got $30 billion for the hiring and trading of new officers, plus a bunch of other enforcement and removal operations, things like buying new planes and all of that. And so they are spending like a sailor, as it were. We have on ICE detention front, one major new development in 2026. In January alone, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE in particular has purchased at least seven commercial warehouses that we know about and are in the process of buying more.
The total cost combined already as publicly reported is about $700 million just to buy the warehouses. They will have to spend billions to convert them into detention centers and staff them. We are looking at some of these warehouses are supposed to be holding upwards of 8,500 people to 9,000 people in a converted commercial warehouse that will probably cost at those scales over a billion dollars a year to operate. And so they want to get those contracts locked in as soon as possible because they are very aware that should Democrats retake the House next year, a lot of that funding may get pulled back just as the Inflation Reduction Act funding for the IRS to go after tax cheats was pulled back by Republicans in the last few years.
BILL KRISTOL:
So people talk about that five year, just to get in the weeds for a second on the legislative side, that five-year appropriation. Sometimes with a fatalism, including, I’d say Democratic members of Congress that, “well, the thing much we can do because this money was appropriated,” but that’s of course not true. No Congress could buy the next Congress. And in areas I know a tiny bit about some defense procurement, they can spend money on something for… There’s a five-year planned appropriation for a purchasing of fancy weapon system. They spend money for the first year or two, they decide they don’t need it, they cancel it. They can claw back. As you say, Biden’s IRA Act, they decided, “No, we’re not spending any more money on IRS enforcement.” But anyway, just to give a sense of the scale, and we don’t know if… Of course, Trump could veto that attempt to claw it back, so he will fight hard, presumably to keep his… That money is already there.
It does make the… We’re speaking on, what, February 11th in the middle of this little fight over the DHS Department of Homeland Security funding bill, which includes obviously ICE and Border Patrol among other less controversial things. And there too, there’s what, 16 billion, I believe, new dollars. Now, normally in another world, that would be their annual regular appropriation, and people would say, “Okay, that’s what it costs to run the basic agencies.” But of course, now they have all this money from the five-year appropriation. And some of us at least are saying, “Well, why are you giving this additional money?” They can just take money from the five-year appropriation and use it for whatever they would use this… I mean, it would be incredible to me if they… Well, not incredible, but it’d be hard for Democrats, I should think, for senators to go along with an additional $16 billion for ICE and Border Patrol given what they’ve been doing for the last year. But we’ll see, I guess.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
I mean, that’s a big fight over the budget right now. I mean, and ICE doesn’t need any more money, effectively speaking, there are some small portions of the agency that they theoretically are not permitted to use the funding from the reconciliation bill on, things like operating E-Verify or separate budget line items. But money is fungible and to a large extent, they can transfer funding from the reconciliation pot of money to other parts of the agency. And of course, ICE operations continue virtually unchanged even during a normal government shutdown. I do think—
BILL KRISTOL:
And Congress could permit some reshuffling of the funds if they want to make sure that E-Verify continues to work.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
ICE has general reprogramming authority. So what that means for non-budget nerds is that ICE is generally authorized to pull budget money from one place and move it to another. They have to notify Congress, but they’re not barred from doing that. So they have the ability to do that. And I do think it’s very notable that when we saw a vote last week around the continuing resolution, just the two-week continuing resolution, that you did see every single Democratic Senator vote to rescind the $75 billion to ICE and divert it to cut Medicare funding. So I think there is very large appetite in the Democratic Caucus to pull that money back.
When we get to—if we ever get to—a point where the Democrats are in control of one House, that is likely going to be a major sticking point during negotiations over any future budget. And I think, don’t want to break it out too far, but quite possible we see a shutdown next year if Democrats retake the House that will be largely based around how much money they can successfully claw back from the $75 billion and more generally from the reconciliation bill, which of course made cuts across a wide variety of government programs that are supported by Democrats.
BILL KRISTOL:
Good. Well, this is very helpful just to set the frame. So okay, so let’s get to the actually what’s happening on the ground on the mass deportation agenda. It certainly looks very… I don’t know. I was pretty worried about it, but I’ve got to say from my point of view, it’s been more dramatic, more upsetting really, more a lot of things than I expected, but you follow it much in fully more closely than I do. So what can one say about what’s been going on for the last year? And is it continuing to ramp up? Is it stable? Is it deescalating as they occasionally seem to claim?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Well, at this point, it is somewhat stable when we actually look at the numbers of arrests, number of detentions, it’s stable trending slowly upwards, but it’s hard to understate exactly how much of a dramatic increase it is from previous years and really from anything the United States has ever done in the past. When you look at what’s happening right now is there has been a very concerted effort by the federal government to ramp up arrests and deportations to hit politically motivated arrest targets. This is not your prioritized enforcement of the past. This is very old school raids, indiscriminate arrest patterns, of course, led by now demoted former El Centro Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, who was briefly commander at large for a number of operations in American cities. But the real changes happened back in May of last year when the White House called every ICE field office director into a room and shouted at them and told them, “Your number one goal is getting arrests up.”
And so what they did after that is they started dropping a lot of the focus on people with serious criminal records—the more traditional targeted enforcement—and instead went into a posture of ramp up arrests no matter what, which meant going after the low-hanging fruit. And the low-hanging fruit in this circumstance meant things like asylum seekers showing up for their court hearings because legally the US government could rearrest them and put them back in detention, and that counts as an arrest for their statistic. And once they were in detention, they could do some intricate legal maneuvers to try to get them to no longer have a fair day in court and just get a new order of removal quickly and put them on a plane within a week or two rather than have to go through a few court processes.
And I think that has motivated a lot of what the Trump administration has been doing over the last eight to 10 months, which is finding ways to shortcut the removal process, to eliminate whatever due process protections and internal barriers there are in between the removal process or the arrest and the removal process so that they can increase the deportation throughput. And that has looked like a lot of tactics and legal maneuvers that we’ve never really seen before, courthouse arrests, mass ICE check-in arrests, a sort of blanket policy, it appears to be, that if an ICE agent ever encounters an asylum seeker who has a valid work permit and any enforcement operation, they just rearrest the person if that’s even possible. Because there are several million—this is I think really under-anticipated, an underknown fact—that there are actually several million people who are in immigration court or have some form of application pending with the US government who are on a path either to eventual legal status or an eventual order of removal, but the question of which way it’s going to go isn’t certain at this point.
And for generations, pretty much all of US history, the US government wouldn’t rearrest these people. They’re going through a process. But when you just want to get arrest numbers, the people who are complying are going to be your easiest targets. They’re not trying to hide. They’re reporting their address to the government. And so the government can just very quickly and easily pick them up, which is why you see all these stories about people with work permits being arrested. Work site raids, that big Hyundai plant in Georgia where all the South Koreans were arrested. Well, there were also dozens of work authorized asylum seekers and applicants for various benefits who were also arrested and detained in that operation despite, again, working legally, but because they could be arrested, they add up to that metric that the White House is looking for, arrests. And so you do have the situation where a ton of people who are going through a process already are being essentially swept up in these mass deportation operations.
And then all of that goes along with, again, further and further efforts to slash due process, eliminate abilities for people to challenge their detention, eliminate any real fair day in court. And that’s been accompanied by really significant purges of the civil service. We’ve had hundreds of immigration judges who have been fired for being too liberal. I mean, genuinely, that’s the only reason. They’re getting sent emails saying, “The president no longer wants your service.” And you look at the lists of names and you go, “Oh, every one of these people had a higher than average asylum grant rate.” And then you look at the things like the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is the appellate body in between the immigration courts and the federal circuit courts purged very early on of every Biden appointee. And a few days ago, they announced a new rule where they said, “We are now just going to summarily deny every single appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals—or almost every single appeal within 15 days—just because we think you’re all going to lose.
And therefore, if you want to eventually appeal to a Circuit Court, we’re just going to make that process quicker.” So they’ve just erased an entire stage of appellate review, a stage that costs $1,000 for people to even file for because all that’s going to do is going to speed up the time between a person getting denied in immigration court and their order of removal becoming final, at which point the US government is legally authorized to put them on a plane and deport them. So that’s the kind of things that they are doing in eliminating fair days in courts and trying to streamline the deportation process, just eliminating all of the safeguards in really cynical ways, again, purging all the liberal appointees and then even doing other things.
For example, targeting Somalis where the US government right now has created a Somali only court docket in immigration court. Every Somali in the country, this is new reporting coming in over the last week or two, that every Somali in immigration court facing removal has had their cases reassigned to a few judges in Louisiana on a nationality specific docket, which is terrifying. We’re saying, “We’re going to single out an ethnic group for different treatment in immigration court because the president thinks they’re garbage.” And that’s the level of bureaucratic attacks on due process for the mass deportation campaign that we’ve been seeing.
BILL KRISTOL:
And the purpose is, as you say, arrest is the metric they want to use, but the purpose is actual deportation and also incentivizing pressuring people to self-deport because of the threats of not wanting to stay in one of these camps for months or the threat of being arrested or the threat of having your child sent one place and you wouldn’t be with her and so forth. So what are those? Give us, again, give me the general sense of what those numbers look like and who are they? And there are some criminals, presumably some violent criminals who are being swept up and sent out of the country, but what’s the numbers? What are the percentages?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
So we don’t have exact deportation numbers. The Trump administration has been repeatedly lying or just misrepresenting—maybe lying is the wrong word, just serially misrepresenting—some statistics. They keep claiming that they’ve hit 700,000 deportations and that number keeps rising dramatically. That’s not true. The actual number seems to be closer to around 400,000. That additional 300,000 appears to be things like people who show up at airports who have visa issues who are told, “You have to get back on the plane and go home because you’ve got a visa problem,” which isn’t a deportation or even things like Canadians turned around at the border for random issues. Things that I don’t think you and I would or any member of the American public would consider to be deportations, they’re counting towards this number because they want it to seem higher as they’re sort of hunting for their one million deportations figure. They’re also doing things like touting self-deportation numbers and they’re claiming two million people left based on really inappropriate use of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ current population survey, which contrary to what it sounds is actually not a survey of the current population. It’s like a panel-based survey using random sampling that doesn’t actually estimate how many people are in the country. That’s the Census Bureau, they do a whole separate thing.
So they’re really trying to inflate the numbers. We know it’s about 400,000 people carried out in ICE removals since Trump took office. So who are these people? Well, again, an increasingly large percentage of them are people with no criminal conviction or anything whatsoever. They are still picking up people with criminal convictions and arrests, new data from CBS News found about 14% of people that ICE had arrested had a violent criminal offense. But to be clear, that includes misdemeanor assault in that statistic. So somebody who gets into a bar fight is going to be listed in that violent criminal convictions. And then of course, there’s an additional maybe three, four, five percent, depending on how you look at it, people with serious nonviolent offenses, things like nonviolent sexual offenses that would be in there. So really maximum, 10 to 20% of these people have what I think most Americans would deem serious offenses.
An additional, depending on how you look at it, an additional 30 to 40% of people who’ve been arrested have nonviolent, lower level misdemeanor traffic violations, DUIs, pending charges for things along those lines. Less serious offenses, and now about 40% of people that have been arrested have nothing. No criminal convictions, no nothing. And that number is going up. And just to give you some sense of how this is happening, the biggest shift in the detention system has been the mass detention of people with no criminal convictions under new interpretations that lead to tens of thousands of people being subject to so called mandatory detention. At the start of Trump’s term, less than a thousand people in the ICE detention system of the 40,000 people held had no criminal conviction. Now, out of the 70,000 people that are in detention as of January 25th, 26,000 have no criminal conviction.
So we’ve gone from 6% of the people arrested by ICE and held in detention having no criminal conviction to 44% of the people arrested by ICE and held in detention who have no criminal records whatsoever. And that number has been going up. 44% as of January 25th, early January, 43%, late December, 42%, mid-December, 41%. So this gives some sense. It is just going up and up and up. As they’ve just run out of serious criminals, there are just more people that they want to target if they want to get their numbers up. The only population that you can target, if you want to get your numbers up quickly, is people who have no criminal convictions, just your garden variety and documented immigrant, either somebody already going through a process, that low hanging fruit that I mentioned before, the people who are already reporting to the US government, who they know where they are and they can just call them in for arrests, or it’s people just working. It’s dishwashers, restaurant workers, it’s farmers, it’s construction workers, the kind of people that can be picked up at a work site raid or a traffic stop.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, those numbers are very helpful and it’s really… And present, the one, I guess, qualification isn’t quite right, but just clarification I might suggest is, I mean, yes, they want to get their numbers up for PR reasons, but they actually want to deport these people. I mean, it’s not like, oh, it’s unfortunate that 44% of these people haven’t committed a violent crime. It’s easier. It’s a little harder sell to the American public, so they don’t emphasize that. But Stephen Miller’s rationalization for what he’s doing is to get those people out as well. I mean, this isn’t sort of an accidental byproduct of tough enforcement the way you might say if cops cracked down in a neighborhood, some people are going to get swept up and stuck in jail for a few days because they were hanging out with a guy who really should have been part of the crackdown. They want those other people…
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
They do. And in fact—
BILL KRISTOL:
… deported and they want them to self-deport as well. I mean, I think it’s really important to—you’ve made this point to me many times just in private conversation—but how much of this, again, people sort of still treat it a little bit as if, “it’s unfortunate what’s happening in some of these neighborhoods in Minneapolis, but they are really going after the bad guys and these other people get in their way and then ICE thinks they’re impeding the arrest,” But they want all these people gone.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. And I do think you’re right. It’s important to say this out loud. The goal of mass deportation is mass deportation. And in order to carry out mass deportation, you’re going to be having to arrest millions of people who are not criminals, who are married to US citizens, who have US citizen children, who have been working in the United States for many years, staying out of trouble, who are members of their local community who have never done anything criminal in the United States. Other than either their initial entry or if their visa overstays, even that’s not technically a crime. And so when you look at the population that they’re targeting, it is everybody because they want to actually do mass deportations. And I think that is why the American public is starting to turn around on this. New polling shows the president is at his lowest level of support ever for immigration enforcement.
And I think that’s because he went into office on this message of we’re going to go after the criminals. Yes, he did say mass deportations. Yes, he did say repeatedly, we’re going to get all of them out. But most people heard because that’s what the administration and the campaign focused on, criminals, criminals, criminals, criminals. But they mean it. And for the first time in American history, Congress has actually given them something of the resources that they need to actually take a shot at this. This is, I think, a historical point also to emphasize. For the last 50 years of the United States’ efforts to combat undocumented immigration, slightly more than 50 years, the focus has been the border. And all of the majority of the resources, the manpower and everything went to the border. It went to border patrol agents, it went to border wall, it went to detention primarily of migrants.
Immigration detention as we know it today started because of Haitian migrants in the early 1980s, not because of any effort to arrest people in the interior. And all of those resources have been designed at keeping people out, but far fewer resources have gone to this idea of what are we going to do about the undocumented population that’s here already. And so for half a century, Americans have gotten used to border enforcement and far more limited interior enforcement. And now all of a sudden, you have an administration coming in and saying, “We’re going to actually do this thing.” And you have Congress saying, “Here’s an unheard of, unprecedented sum of money, more money than the FBI gets, more money than any other federal law enforcement agency gets for you to actually carry this thing out.”
And in order to do that, it is leading to the situations that we’re seeing in American cities, a bunch of people being arrested who the vast majority of the American public doesn’t think should be the target of enforcement, but this administration says, “Well, these are the laws on the books. You’ve given us the money to do it. We want to do it. We’re going to do it. And if you disagree, you’re the terrorist, you’re the anti-Americans, and we’re going to try to throw you in jail for resisting.”
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. Well, let me ask about that and then I want to, well, two questions. You can answer obviously whatever order you want. One is on the historical point. I was very interested in what you said about the last 50 years, but I guess even the preceding decades where there was stricter limits on immigration back to 1924 and so forth, and even before that, when they excluded certain groups, the Chinese and so forth in the late 19th century, there were strict restrictions on people coming in and border enforcement and turning famously the St. Louis away and so forth with European Jews and remember that was the end of the ’30s. But I don’t know, have we ever had this kind of internal mass deportation effort in the US, even before the modern 1965 regime? I’m just thinking about history. I mean, I guess Japanese and German.
I don’t know. I mean, it just feels to me like we’ve never, when they passed the law in 1924, they didn’t go out and round up everyone who come in for the preceding 15 years—who were from disfavored ethnic groups, now disfavored ethnic groups after they passed the law in ’24—and say, “Okay, you’re out.” I mean, if you were in, that’s A, and B, a lot of these people, of course, some are just, not just some, are undocumented, some had dreamer status, and many were registered with the federal government, as you’ve said. Some had temporary protected status, which the administration’s trying to take away. So it’s not as if these people are sort of hiding in the shadows doing God knows what and haven’t been caught yet for a violent crime.
A ton of them, let me give you some sense of the numbers here if you want, have been here quite a while, have been known to be here quite a while, have been paying taxes quite a while, have been registered with the federal government quite a while, and those are some substantial percentage really of the people who they’re going after and who are being deported. And then the other thing which we can get to in a few minutes is the degree to which the sole effort is also leading to a kind of, let’s call it law enforcement that we’re not really familiar with in terms of cracking down on protestors for impeding law enforcement and trying to deny people first and fourth amendment rights and all that. But maybe we get to that in a few minutes. I’m just curious on the first point. Am I right? It’s your point, but I mean, the radicalness of what they are now trying to do on the mass deportation side.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
There are a couple of historical parallels. If you feel really interesting is if you go back to the first ever immigration enforcement, the first version of what we might today call ICE officers were known as “Chinese catchers” and were created in the late 19th century to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act because actually the first irregular migration into the United States was Chinese migrants coming first into Canada and then also in through Mexico to get around the Chinese Exclusion Acts. Some of those so called Chinese catchers actually became some of the first border patrol agents after the border patrol was created in 1924. There are sort of two historical parallels, I think, to the level of raids we’re seeing today. The first is the Palmer raids in the early 20th century, which were anti-communist raids where thousands of immigrants were rounded up and deported as well along with those, which included a lot of prominent leftists and socialists who ended up arrested and deported back to Europe in those raids.
And that also involved a lot of allegations of total violations of constitutional rights. But a hundred years ago, the law around that was much more in favor of the government and individual liberties were less protected by the Supreme Court at the time. And then the other comparison is what President Trump has repeatedly compared his operations to, is Operation Wetback in 1954 under President Eisenhower. The key difference, I think, with that operation is that it really focused two things. First, it was mainly about the border, again, because that is where most undocumented immigrants lived. In the 1950s, the undocumented population were primarily seasonal migrant labor or people who were from an earlier generation in the ways the border used to just be so much more porous and bi-national than it is today. You’d have people just wandering back and forth across the border. There was very little actual inspection of people comparatively speaking, and especially after World War II, a lot of farms and agriculture in the region used migrant labor, and laborers would just walk back and forth without really anyone stopping them.
So when those targeted communities—they were targeting border communities primarily—and they were just as sloppy in some ways as the operations we’re seeing today. A lot of Mexican Americans, people born in this country were rounded up and deported back to Mexico. And the other thing about that, it was immediately followed by essentially a legalization, the expansion of the Bracero program. So there was decades back then of that era of a process of deportation than what they called drying out. So again, apologies for using the phrase, but the idea was you would arrest the “wetbacks” and then bring them to the border and border patrol would then dry them out, issue them legal admission to come back and work for the same employer. So you essentially had this process where they’d say, “Okay, we just want to regularize you.”
And the regularization was, this is when the border patrol had way more ability to do that sort of thing. Congress has significantly restricted that ability. And so you didn’t have this idea of, we’re going to kick everybody out and that’s it. That was, we just want to sort of regularize people through this mass deportation campaign. And by most estimates, almost everybody who is deported under that operation was back in the United States six months to a year later.
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s interesting. I didn’t know that history. Anyway, so it is, I mean, this attempt to really reduce permanently, get rid permanently of these people who’ve been here in many cases for quite a while and many cases with all kinds of not violent, not criminals at all, and in many cases with all kinds of jobs and relationships and family relationships and so forth. Yeah, that is really something. And so give me—
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. And one quick note, because you also asked me about numbers here. I think two quick points on that. The most recent data that we have suggests about eight and a half to nine million of the people who are undocumented have been here for 15 years or longer. There are still at least a million people who came in the 1980s, about two million people who came in the 1990s, an additional two and a half million people who came in the 2010s. So we’re talking millions of people who have been in this country long enough to put down roots. And of course, also so worth emphasizing when we’re talking about this is that the American public has for decades supported giving the vast majority of those people a path to legal status.
BILL KRISTOL:
Oh, that’s both interesting and a little chilling. Anyway, so we’re doing this. And then what about the people who, so as you say, many of them have registered for whatever they were told they should register for to get on a path to legal status and to… Talk a little bit about those different programs. I mean, we don’t have to get into every single one of them. It’s complicated, but it does seem like there are people who, hundreds of thousands of people who of different groups, the Haitians you mentioned, that’s not quite as many, but who are here under, well, I guess it is that many, who are under temporary protected status. And obviously that was temporary. It could run out at some point. It was understood that they might have to go back to their country, especially if the conditions that made previous administrations decide they deserve not to be sent back, they ought not to be sent back if those conditions change.
But it does seem like the Trump administration is just with one swoop removing hundreds of thousands, I guess maybe more than millions, I don’t know, of people from that TPS, temporary protected status situation. I mean, what are the main groups we’re talking about here and…
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah, TPS is the largest. Of course, yes, the T in TPS stands for temporary. But if you look at the statute and if you look at what Congress intended, temporary was supposed to mean until the conditions in the person’s home country that led to the designation have ended. And there are some TPS designations, some of which have lasted 20 plus years where you can maybe say, “Well, I’m not sure if the reasons that led to it are still in place.” There, it’s often, there’s some where you can argue it has maybe been a little bit more about humanitarianism. People who’ve been checking in with the US government every 18 months for 25 years have lost their status. These are people who don’t have any other path to permanent legal status. If they had it, they would’ve applied for it, but they don’t. And I think there’s a widespread misunderstanding among most Americans who think, “You can fix your papers if you just try hard enough.” That’s just not true.
For the overwhelming majority of the undocumented population, unless Congress changes the law, they will never be able to get a green card, period, end of story. So about a million, 1.3 million people had temporary protected status when Trump took office. The vast majority of those were Haitians, Venezuelans, about 350,000 Haitians, about 650,000 Venezuelans and about 180,000 Salvadorans who have had it since 2001. The Haitians got TPS… There’s a lot of confusion here because there’s been a couple of Haitian TPS designations. About 50,000 of that 350,000 got TPS thanks to the Haiti earthquake in 2010. And then they had it for about a decade until 2021 where a month after the assassination of the Haitian president by foreign mercenaries, the Biden administration re-designated TPS and extended it to new people for the first time in a decade. So any Haitian who has TPS today, their TPS is not about the earthquake, that is 50,000 who just managed to get it through that decade period.
It is now about the current situation in Haiti where conditions are still deteriorating, where the gangs control over 90% of the capital, where roadblocks throughout the country mean you can’t travel safely between cities. There’s a few enclaves where those with resources have been able to hire private security and get some safety. A few parts of the country are still safe, very small percent, but over a million people are internally displaced within the country. And the Trump administration just came in and said, “We don’t care about any of that. We just want to kick you off. Even though we acknowledge that the situation has not improved sufficiently such that it is safe for you to go back, we just no longer think you should have TPS.” Now, that’s been temporarily blocked in court, but the Trump administration is appealing it and it’s very possible that that decision gets overturned.
And then you’re going to have, again, 350,000 people, the majority of whom entered legally, who are suddenly going to be illegalized and told, “If you do not leave immediately, you are subject to detention and deportation. And also, you can’t work anymore. Your work permits are no longer valid.” And again, this is a population that has had to go through background checks, that is reporting their address changes to the US government, that has been working legally. And that, again, in the majority of cases entered the country legally without violating a single law and has never been out of legal status.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. I mean, just to clarify that very last point quickly, I mean, if you didn’t check in at 18 months, if you committed a crime, if you, I don’t know, did something else that violates the conditions of TPS, you lost it. I mean, even under Biden—
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. Under any administration. You have to reprove TPS—
BILL KRISTOL:
You lost it. It’s not as if TPS is a get out of jail free card that you just say, “TPS,” and then no one gets to ask what you’ve been doing for these 18 months or whether you’ve committed crimes or whether you’ve cheated on taxes or whatever. I mean, so that’s what’s kind of astonishing I think when, and I think people don’t fully understand that. You hear about it and you think, well, they’re these 200,000 people and no one knows what they’re doing and they just got this blanket okay, but that’s not the case. We know who they are and they’re checking in. Or if they’re not checking in, then they can be deported or if they commit a crime, I think.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah, 100%. And TPS, again, it’s this unique status that can be granted for six, 12 or 18 months at any time every time that you apply for it initially. So you could only apply for it initially when it is officially designated or re-designated, and then from then on it’s renewals. At the initial application and at every renewal, you have to once again prove that you qualify. And proving that you qualify means proving that you’re here without violation, that you’re not committing any crimes. The US government’s running background checks, putting your fingerprints through all the databases every 18 months, so people with TPS are some of the most vetted non-citizens in the country, because unlike a lot of other applications that may be, like with a green card renewal, the US government’s only checking once every 10 years. If you pop up in some other database, they might find out about you, but with TPS, the US government is checking you to make sure that you qualify every 18 months, every time this status is renewed.
So, there are some people, the Salvadorans who’ve had TPS since 2001 for 25 years, again, they are probably the most vetted non-citizens in the entire country, because they’ve had to pass a background check every 18 months for the last 25 years. Should President Trump, or actually, technically, Secretary Noem decide to terminate their status, there’s going to be 170,000 people—who, if they had another path to legal status, they would’ve gotten it, because you want the permanence—who have checked in every 18 months for 25 years that may suddenly be told, “We’re stripping you of your work permits. It’s time for you to be deported.”
BILL KRISTOL:
It’s terrible, but interesting but terrible. I mean, say a word about asylum just quickly, but we’ve heard about a fair amount about that, as something that was out of control and so forth. What are those numbers like, and what’s happening with people who have sought asylum or who are seeking asylum?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Of course, the big thing is that it’s basically impossible to seek asylum anymore if you want to come to the border. Asylum at the southern border is dead. It is technically still on the books, but as an actual practical matter, it is dead. That’s without any legal changes from Congress. The administration is just ignoring it. The big shift in immigration courts and elsewhere has been what’s known as safe, third-country agreements, and one exception to the right to apply for asylum is, if the US government has an agreement with another country where that country says, “We will hear the asylum claim.” This was always anticipated to be real, legitimate, bilateral agreements, and the first and only safe, third-country agreement deal was for decades with Canada, where it was a bilateral deal. If an asylum seeker went from Canada to the United States, the United States could deport them back to Canada, and Canada would hear the claim.
If an asylum seeker went from the United States to Canada, Canada would deport them back to the United States, and the United States would agree to hear the claim. What the Trump admin has done is say, “Well, we actually can just pressure smaller, Latin American countries or countries in random places around the world to sign these deals, even if these countries don’t have any real asylum system, and there’s nothing in the law stopping us from just saying, ‘Well, okay. We can send everybody there.'” So, they’ve signed agreements with Honduras, with Ecuador, with Guatemala, with Uganda, and there’s a few others that are in the works that have been signed but not put into effect yet, including with Belize and Paraguay. The way that they’re doing this is essentially they’re saying, “We’re going to clear the millions of asylum applications by just summarily denying all of them and saying, “Go to this third country.”
A great example of this, a Venezuelan asylum seeker, maybe a political dissident who’s been jailed by Maduro, goes into immigration court with his asylum application. He’s filled out all the evidence. He has proof that he’s being persecuted in his home country. He goes into the court. The ICE trial attorney says to the judge, “Judge, we’re moving to pretermit,” is the phrase they use, “Which means summarily dismissed without a hearing, the asylum application, because this guy can be deported to Honduras instead, and Honduras will hear his asylum claim,” and the judge goes, “Okay, done.” You never get your day in court, and at this point, the person has two options. Either they withdraw their asylum application and say, “You know what? I’ll take my chances in my home country,” or they get deported to the third country, a place where they have never even been before, because there’s no requirement that you ever even go somewhere.
This is leading to really outrageous situations. Like the Trump administration attempted to deport a Chinese dissident to Uganda. This is a guy who had documented Uyghur detention camps in Xinjiang, China, who had actually put himself at very significant risk of being arrested by the Chinese Security Services, was detained, sent to a detention center upstate New York, and the government said, “We don’t want to hear your asylum claim. We’re just going to send you to Uganda.” That kicked off of enough outrage, that they actually agreed to limit the Uganda safe, third-country agreement only to Africans, and he did eventually win his asylum claim. So, there are people with winnable cases who are being told, “We just aren’t going to hear them,” and that’s really what they’re doing with these asylum claims. It’s very clear that their goal and their way to get rid of this backlog is to simply not hear as many cases as possible. Then, on top, there’s even more on top of that.
BILL KRISTOL:
What are the overall numbers of people here who have claimed asylum?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
There are about three and a half million pending asylum applications. About two and a half, a little bit more than two and a half million of those are in immigration court. Really crucial to understand that doesn’t mean two and a half individual cases. A lot of those are joint cases. You might get a father who applied, and then he has a derivative claim for his wife and his children, so less than two and a half million individual cases are going to actually be heard. There’s also 1.1 million cases pending in the affirmative asylum system that’s at USCIS, US Citizenship and Immigration Services. These are people who entered the country and were not placed into removal proceedings and then filed for asylum.
So, that’s things like the Venezuelans, Cubans, and Haitians that came in through the parole programs, who entered the country legally and then applied for asylum with USCIS, who are not yet in the removal process. There as well, the administration is going after things. We’ve seen, ever since the shooting of the National Guardsman in DC, all affirmative asylum applications are currently paused. They’re hearing the interviews, and they’re refusing to issue any decisions, so that’s now been a two-month pause on issuing any asylum grants at all or denials for that matter. They’ve just put an indefinite pause on all affirmative asylum, and they’ve also done similar things to people applying for other immigration benefits, but there as well, the goal is very clearly just mass denials so that they can say, “We’ve gotten rid of all of these cases.”
BILL KRISTOL:
And just to be clear, these people are in the system, they’ve applied, and if they were found to commit a violent crime, they could be booted anyway. Is that correct? I mean, again, it’s not as if people are here, doing whatever they want and ignoring US laws. They’re hoping to get asylum and, meanwhile, are subject to, obviously, to all of our laws and so forth.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. Under US law, after six months, an asylum applicant can apply for a work permit. Because the process is so backlogged, many people are working legally while their case goes through the system, and this is where I mentioned they’re going after the low hanging fruit, people whose applications are pending who are working legally. That’s why you constantly hear situations, increasingly, where people are being arrested, and their employer and everybody says, “This person was working here legally.” A snowplow driver in Minnesota was arrested and is currently in detention,” and the city says, “This is ridiculous. He’s here legally,” and the answer is yes and no. This is sort of a liminal, limbo status for a lot of people. They are technically removable. The US government has the legal authority to detain them, but they’re just at the back of a long line waiting for their day in court.
BILL KRISTOL:
And they’ve done what they were supposed to do, in the sense that they applied for asylum. They got a work permit. They’re not dodging. They’re not working under illegally.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. They’re working legally. They’re paying taxes. They’re reporting into the government. They often have check-ins with ICE, where they ensure that they are in compliance, and every previous administration, even the Trump administration, would not have arrested those people because they haven’t done anything wrong. They’re literally just at the back of the line, waiting for their chance to have their case heard, but when you need to get these arrest numbers, that’s a very easy population to go after. It does seem to be that there is a general policy right now that, when ICE officers encounter somebody in that situation, even if they have a valid work permit, even if they haven’t done anything wrong, they just run into a random ICE officer who’s out on an operation.
They go, “Well, you’re technically arrestable. We’re going to detain you, and arrest you, and keep you in detention,” and it’s not that your case is immediately dismissed, but you’re going to be moving up from having your case heard outside of detention in court, with your lawyers there when you’re prepped for it, to suddenly you’re thrown in detention, you’re away from your job, you’re away from your family, you’re away from your resources, and there’s an ICE officer coming to you every single day in detention, and saying, “You can get out today if you sign on this paper and give up your right to a day in court. Come back the next day.” They say, “We’ll give you $2,000. We’ll give you $3, 000 if you just sign this and go away.”
BILL KRISTOL:
And that becomes self-deportation numbers. Yeah.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. There’s two self-deportation operations going on right now. The very well known one is CBP Home, which they advertise constantly, where they’ve been forced to keep raising the price, clearly because they haven’t gotten that much demand. Through November, apparently 35,000 people used it, which is not nothing, but it’s not a high number. That was initially offering $1,000. Then, they raised it to $2,000 over the holiday break, and then now they’ve raised it to $2,600, but there’s a separate cash payment far less known for people who are in detention, and those payments are even higher, $3,500, and I’ve heard reports of offers as high as $5,000 for people to give up and not get their day in court. Those numbers as well keep going up, because a lot of people, especially those who’ve been here for so long, have something to fight for, they aren’t taking those offers, but the psychological pressure is enormous.
It’s hard to understate, again, how intense the pressure is on people, once they get into detention, to give up, and on top of that, there are anecdotal reports of people who are essentially just being deported even when they didn’t sign the paper, with ICE officers forging their signatures, some reports of literally ICE officers holding people’s hands and physically forcing them to sign, and some people just getting deported even when there was no paperwork signed. They just get shoved onto the plane by accident due to government error, and they just get deported even when they still had pending court hearings, and they did nothing. Literally, the US government just deported them illegally, and those cases are still quite rare, but going up as the system just becomes more and more unaccountable and all of the internal barriers and restrictions that would prevent that kind of thing are sort of pushed aside in favor of ramping up speed.
BILL KRISTOL:
I should let you go reasonably soon, but let me ask you, I guess, three categories of questions, all of which I think… You’re good at this, you can deal with it reasonably quickly. I mean, one is legal immigration, just a quick overview of what’s happening there. Two is, maybe take it up first as you just mentioned it, is how much are we eroding traditional protections of due process and of all kinds of protections for both immigrants and, in many cases, for US citizens who get swept up in this, and certainly for people who are here legally, as you say, and working and so forth? One has the feeling, looking at the videos, I mean, God knows we have police brutality in the past in the US, and we have systemic brutality against some groups and so forth, but this just feels different almost in scale.
Maybe you’d have to go back to the South, and obviously Blacks were subject to this for a heck of a long time and some places still are a little bit, but I mean, there’s not something I recall seeing in major cities. I was talking to someone in New York, who was part of the Bloomberg administration, Mayor Bloomberg’s, and they got in a lot of trouble and ended up losing in court, because they had those racial profiling, really, for the so called stop-and-frisk stops… But as this person pointed out to me, she agreed that actually it was probably a mistake to do it the way they did it and so forth, but it wasn’t like— they were not pulling over cars, bashing the windows, and yanking people out. They were showing up. They were police. They had their name tag on.
They said, “Sir.” I don’t know how polite they always were, but in principle, they were accountable. They stopped you, and they asked and they wanted to see if you had a criminal record, basically. The courts decided it was not appropriate to do this based on race, but still, it wasn’t this kind of almost preemptive brutality at times and sort of just flouting of Fourth Amendment, First Amendment, other kinds of protections. Also, for the protestors, the degree to which they seemed to have just decided that impeding law enforcement is a catchall that means that if you’re taking a photo, if you’re filming them from nearby or telling other people where they are, that you’re “impeding law enforcement.”
And so, I’m just curious on that whole complex of sort of civil liberties issues. We have some history of this in the US and not always being respectful of them. So I’m just curious how much further you think that’s gone. So, both the legal, illegal maybe second, but the civil liberties issues first, and then third, we’ll close with this. Just overall then, what does this regime, immigration regime look like, and what is its goal and where does it go if it keeps going over the next three years? Anyway, that’s a big platter of things for you to deal with in 15 minutes, but you’re capable of it, so go.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. Well, I’ll start with legal immigration, and I think with legal immigration, the big message and story is by and large efforts to use hidden weapons of immigration laws sitting on the books for generations, untouched, to essentially recreate a modern version of the 1924 immigration restrictions, the national origin quotas. 39 countries are currently subject to immigrant visa bans thanks to the travel ban authority, plus the Palestinian authority, including Nigeria, the largest or the most populated country in Africa. These are bans on, in many cases, non-immigrant visas, so tourist student visas and the like, but more significantly, these are now blanket bans on immigrant visas, so that means people who come here through their family members or through employment-based visas who get green cards. And so, right now, I keep emphasizing, this affects Americans too. If you marry someone from one of those 39 countries, you cannot get a green card to bring that person to the United States.
It is now impossible. You are now barred from bringing your spouse here just because of where they were born and their nationality, for 39 countries, including, again, the most populous country in Africa. And that is a very significant restriction on American liberties, but it’s extended beyond that. There is now an indefinite pause on immigrant visa issuance for 75 countries. It’s an overlapping list that includes not just those 39 countries, but a bunch of others, to the point that, at this moment, about 90% of African countries, you cannot get an immigrant visa from. Now, the latest immigrant visa pause on 75 countries is about their efforts to transform something known as the public charge ground of an inadmissibility into a defacto wealth test so that you can only come here if you’re rich. And so, again, these efforts to reshape immigration along those lines on very racial and class-based lines.
Even inside the United States, since the shooting of the National Guardsmen in late November around Thanksgiving, there has now been a pause on anyone who comes from one of those 39 countries from getting any immigration benefit inside the United States, allegedly to address their various vetting issues. Of course, the actual shooter was incredibly well vetted. He was a CIA… he worked for the CIA on top secret missions in Afghanistan. The idea that the guy wasn’t vetted is ridiculous, but they’re just using this as an excuse to essentially say, “We just don’t want people from ‘third-world countries,'” to use the exact phrases that the US government has used, is they want to stop people coming from certain countries. As you’ve seen the most bigoted examples have been in the president’s rhetoric against Somalis, but they view most Africans, most Central Americans as people they don’t want here, and they are using every administrative tool in their toolbox to accomplish that.
That is really going to transform the legal immigration system, although there actually will not be a drop in immigration that’s that significant, simply because the backlogs in most of the visa categories are so high, that you could stop a million people from getting visas and there would still be the exact same number of visa issues, because there’s more than a million people waiting in line. So, that will take a few years to actually, so significant drops. So the biggest drop will be among immediate relatives of US citizens, who are now subject to dramatic restrictions if you come from one of those 39 travel ban countries or the 75 countries that have had an indefinite pause, which could last for months. So, that’s legal immigration, and they’re imposing other restrictions across the board as well with the goal of reducing legal immigration. On this broader point about civil liberties, that’s another area where, of course, an attack on due process impacts all of us.
Everybody has seen cases where US citizens have been detained for clearly racial profiling reasons, where lawful permanent residents, people with green cards, people with temporary protected status, people with valid status who have done nothing wrong are ending up detained, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, and where the aggressive posture of officers really is causing backlash, because people are seeing it and they’re unhappy with it. You mentioned, of course, Jim Crow and other oppressive systems that the United States has had in the past. I don’t think, obviously, the situation we have right now is as bad as Jim Crow. We are not yet at a level of racialized oppression built into every part of the legal system. But in some Southern states that are working very closely with the Trump administration, we are starting to see more legal structures. In Texas, they’re imposing new ID restrictions, cutting undocumented immigrants and their families away from public access to benefits that they’ve previously had.
Things like access to in state college tuition, that was a bipartisan measure as recently as a decade or 15 years ago, have now been eliminated. You have state law enforcement officers who are in Florida, the Florida Highway Patrol who is working daily with ICE, and essentially doing stop and frisk type stops of any car driven by a Latino to check their papers, just to see pre-textual stops or tinted windows or one headlight out or whatever. They find whatever reason to pull over a car if they look Latino and question them, and if they’re undocumented, then they call Border Patrol to come pick the people up. That’s the kind of thing that’s happening. It’s not, obviously, Jim Crow level. I think we’d have to reach another level of state oppression before we go back to those horrors. But it is getting increasingly bad as civil liberties, and that’s why so many American citizens of Latino descent or non-white dissent are carrying their passports with them now, because they’re very worried about what’s going to happen.
It’s also clear that these abuses are not being addressed by the DHS. Yes, some officers probably are being disciplined in ways that is non-public. Officer disciplinary records are generally protected and the government doesn’t brag about it, but all of these things are happening in a situation where the leadership up top is sending the message that officers can get away with anything, even if that’s not true, even if there is still some internal disciplinary processes. I talked to some people who have close ties at ICE or have worked at ICE, and some of them are trying to tell me I’m being overly dramatic, there are still internal disciplinary processes, and I wish I could trust them, but I just don’t trust it anymore, given what’s happening. And so, I think that’s—
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s so interesting.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
And so, I think that’s a big shift, yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting, there’s a political scientist, his name escapes me now, teaches in Singapore or something, a political theorist on political philosophy type, who has made an argument—which I hadn’t really thought about, I don’t know why, until I heard him make it, actually, a few months ago at a conference—which is, he’s written this up in articles and books, that when you want to be restrictionist on immigration, it sounds like you have an immigration policy and an immigration debate. But actually, it’s very hard to have a restrictionist and certainly a mass deportation type of immigration regime without affecting civil liberties at home.
The way in which you carry out the mass deportation invites all kinds of abrogations of civil liberties. It’s not like every immigrant lives distinct from people who aren’t immigrants, and they’re in one apartment house or one building, one house sometimes if they’re related or whatever, subletting or something, renting. And therefore, when you bash in the door, you’re also affecting the door that’s the door to an American citizen’s residence. And if you think the Fourth Amendment doesn’t require you to do much, then suddenly the Fourth Amendment’s gone for some citizens. Leaving aside even the slippery slope character of once you get used to doing it, you sort of legitimize it for others, and the racial profiling side of it.
I thought that was a striking argument and an interesting one, that if you care about civil liberties, you do not want this at home for the 300 million Americans who are not undocumented or recent immigrants, who presumably might think they’re exempt from this. The legal regime, the judicial regime even, under which they live, the police regime in some ways, the law enforcement regime, is going to change as well. Do you think there’s something to that?
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. I think that’s 100% correct. And I think that segues well into that last question you had for me, which is where do we go from here? What does all of this mean? Well, again, going back to what mass deportations mean, the US government wants to arrest, detain and deport one in every 24 people in the country, 4% of the US population. In some cities, in some neighborhoods, it’s as high as one in 10 people. In some, it’s probably even higher than that, maybe one in three in some neighborhoods. That cannot be done without fundamentally transforming who we are as a people and our relationship to law enforcement, because as you said, these are not people who are distinct and separate and apart from the community, they are part of it. Again, about eight and a half to nine million have been here for 15-plus years.
There’s about six million mixed status families in the United States, where you’ve got an undocumented immigrant with a US citizen parent or child or spouse. And of course, undocumented immigrants work at businesses with American citizens, they hire American citizens in some circumstances. Some of them are employers, they start small businesses. They rent commercial property, they go to church, they bring their kids to school, they participate in the community. And when they are deported, the community notices and is impacted. Small towns are going to lose everyone who works at a factory, for example, following raids, and that may lead to a factory closing, that may lead to small businesses in that town closing, and all of that impacts the broader economy. When you had me on a year ago, we had just done a big report into the economic and fiscal impacts of mass deportations, and we found that mass deportations would lead to a drop in GDP of 4.8% to 6.4%, which would be higher than the Great Recession. And we’re already seeing the economic impacts. That’s why you have some Trump administration officials trying to defend potentially low job creation numbers, which didn’t turn out as low as anticipated, by saying, “It’s because we’re deporting so many people, that means there are going to be fewer jobs.”
And so, you are going to have those economic impacts. But all of this is going to continue to ramp up, because the Trump administration shows no sign of pulling back. I mentioned at the start, these warehouses that are going up, the Trump administration wants to build, as Todd Lyons, acting director of ICE, said, “Amazon Prime, but for human beings.” They want a industrialized, modernized system of mass detention and deportation, where rather than using a patchwork of local facilities around the country, they just buy a bunch of commercial warehouses, throw up some cots on the inside, some internal barriers and some rudimentary services, and say, “These are our new detention centers, 8,000 people, 8,500 people, 9,000 people in this converted commercial warehouse, because that’s the easiest way for us to carry out these campaigns,” and that’s something you can’t go back from.
That community is going to know, if you have that, that we hosted 9,000 people held on any given day in these tiny small town communities. To give some sense of scale, if a single one of those facilities goes online, at 8,500 people, it’ll be the largest prison in the United States currently. Rikers Island technically can hold more if it’s at max capacity, but it’s not currently holding that many. So at 8,500, it would be the largest prison in the country, and they want to build three or four of these at that scale. And then, we start talking about a scale of detention, the only modern comparison is Japanese internment. And of course, the purpose of internment wasn’t deportation, though actually some Japanese were deported, but nevertheless, the country was damaged by Japanese internment. You had huge portions of towns ripped up, their businesses taken, homes stolen, and it fundamentally reshaped the country, and we have come to look on it with shame.
That’s what’s going to happen, unless this isn’t pulled back. Because even right now, 400,000 deportations a year, say the money comes online, they can increase that to 600,000 deportations a year, you are still looking at a mass deportation operation that is going to be 10 to 15 to 20 years of this. So this isn’t a one quick rip off the band aid to get rid of the undocumented population. This is one to two decades of this, if it is not pulled back, if Congress doesn’t do anything. And I think I will end then on the point that I’ve been making more and more often, it is time for Congress to do something.
We haven’t made any changes to our immigration laws in 30 years, and the world of 1996, which is the last time we made any major changes to the immigration laws, is not the world of 2026. We live in a different world with a different society, a different culture and different problems, and we cannot keep using this zombie view of the undocumented population and the laws and authorities in the modern era and think that it’s going to be good for this country.
The vast majority of Americans don’t want most of these people deported, but this admin says, “We’re going to do it anyway. And we’re going to… full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes. And really, we don’t care how much collateral damage occurs, because in our view, getting these people out is the ultimate goal,” which will usher in their new, honestly, white majority society is what they want, as much as they try to deny it.
BILL KRISTOL:
If they even deny it anymore.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK::
Barely.
BILL KRISTOL:
I mean, the explicit calls for, well, remigration, that literally is what that means. I mean, it’s out-migrating or expelling the people they want to expel, who are the most recent immigrants presumably, who tend to be not as white and not as European, and they’re pretty explicit at times about who they want to get rid of, as you said, in terms of countries of origin and race actually and culture, that’s the term they use as opposed to heritage Americans.
I’m pretty amazed, I’ll just pose this to you and let you close, one more closing moment, just the explicitness in which we’ve gone down this slope, from a kind of, “It’s a law enforcement issue, there’s some criminals,” to, “They may be taking some jobs from lower income Americans and it’s a little out of control and disorganized system and we’re going to be stricter on it,” to even a kind of, “Okay, you know what? We just need a bit of a pause on immigration. It’s historically been pretty high. We need to take that overall number down, so we are going to make some tough decisions.”
But we’re way beyond that, even in the official justifications coming from obviously Stephen Miller, but even the President, he’s not as coherent as Miller, and from Vance and so forth, and from very senior people at DHS and elsewhere. This happened pretty much in a year or two years. Some of that was there in the rhetoric of the first term, some of it was there in the rhetoric of the campaign, but not nearly as much in the first term and not even as much in the campaign. So I don’t know. I mean, we could stabilize, I suppose, at this level of a mixture of rhetorics, so to speak, or it could keep going down in this direction. Aren’t you struck at how fast it’s gone though? I’m more than a little astonished and perturbed by that.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah, of course, it’s not just immigration, it’s the broader federal government has been purged of basically anyone who believes in the broader principles of good governance, or I think a more charitable way to put it, which I’m not sure if they even deserve the charity, would be the government has been transformed into a arm of the Trump id, and with the idea that there is no resistance. You either do what the President and his advisors say or you’re fired. It doesn’t matter if your objection is because what they are suggesting is a terrible idea and you want to push back and say, “Look, I’ve been working in this field, I’m an expert, here’s all the reasons you’re wrong,” or if you say it’s illegal.
In Minnesota, basically every single US attorney in the DOJ’s Minnesota office has resigned or quit in the last month. You’ve got ICE prosecutors leaving in Minnesota because they’re horrified at what’s going on. You’ve got these failed grand jury indictments at the Department of Justice. You’ve got the CDC refusing to grant permission to Moderna to do mRNA vaccines that could cure cancer because of RFK Jr.’s issues. This is a broader attack on a lot of things. But with immigration, it really is notable, the extent to which they just are no longer even just winking at white nationalist tropes, but just openly deploying them, and then calling anybody who says anything about that the real bigots.
And the best example of this was DHS posted a recruitment ad on Instagram using a song that is known as the Proud Boy anthem, that was written by a openly white nationalist band called We’ll Have Our Home Again. And the Instagram ad not only said, “We’ll have our home again,” it played the music in the background. And when Tricia McLaughlin, the chief DHS press officer, was asked about it, she said, “We don’t ever use this music. How dare you suggest that?” Then the New York Times sent her the clip, showing, “Yes, you did,” she immediately said, “Well, you’re the racist,” and then 40 minutes later, deleted that video off Instagram. And that is what’s happening now.
As we talk, the morning that we are recording this, news broke from the New York Times that they have now elevated a 21-year-old staffer, who was at the Department of Labor, who was posting, again, very openly white nationalist rhetoric using the Gothic Fraktur script used by the Nazis to post really outrageous stuff about culture change, is now becoming the deputy communications director at the Department of Homeland Security at 21. These are far-right online gripers, is the term for those who are not deeply aware of that, people who are accelerationists, who really believe this white nationalist rhetoric, that not just undocumented immigrants, immigrants, non-white immigrants, are changing the culture of the United States. They are firmly on belief of the Great Replacement theory, that Democrats are trying to replace Americans with non-white immigrants. They believe this in their heart of hearts and they’re the ones in power right now.
And there are still plenty of people at the Department of Homeland Security, who are law enforcement professionals, who don’t believe this or are horrified about what’s happening, so I really don’t want to say everyone in ICE is a racist, everyone in ICE is a Nazi. That’s not true, there are plenty of people who are going along to getting along and trying to find a way out. But the people in charge believe this, and they believe it deep in their bones, and they are perfectly fine to go along with whatever they’re ordered to do or are ordering others to do.
BILL KRISTOL:
And the Republican-dominated control of Congress is doing nothing to stop, slow or modify what’s happening. That’s really striking to me. They’ll privately say—
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
There have been no investigations.
BILL KRISTOL:
I mean, literally, just not a single amendment to a law, not a single difficult hearing, where you say how many people have been disciplined. Not a single, of course, denial of confirmation. Maybe one junior person didn’t get confirmed somewhere, I don’t know.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Paul Ingrassia didn’t get confirmed as Office of Special Counsel because his pro-Nazi tweets were just a little too much for them to publicly—
BILL KRISTOL:
But the degree to which the entire one of the two major parties in the country has just decided they can’t fight this and don’t want to fight it or agree with it or some combination of all these things, that’s what gives it, of course, real power. I mean, it would be powerful anyway if the President of the United States embraced it, and you had Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and all these people there, but it’s the utter failure to push back. Some push back, the courts is a different story, obviously. But it is really striking though. And of course, they’re also eroding civil service protections.
You’re right to give us the bigger perspective at the end though, because it is part of a bigger thing. And it does make the point, actually, that you and I were discussing a bit earlier, that these things don’t happen in isolation. You might tell yourself, “Well, the mass deportation thing, that’s an immigration policy. I don’t fully agree with it, but they ran on it, they won and that’s that. But otherwise, I’m very much for my traditional views on civil liberties and on limited government and on Back the Blue, good law enforcement procedures and stuff.” But it doesn’t in practice, you can’t separate them.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Yeah. I mean, I know people who work for ICE who are trying to get out now, and the only reason they haven’t quit yet is because they have a family that they need to feed, and there will be more people like that. The issue is that they are now being as quickly replaced as possible with true believers, who have been targeted specifically through recruitment campaigns aiming at the kind of people who support this stuff. And I think that is a broader government shift that’s going to be something that has to be addressed in the future if this money is ever pulled back.
Though, of course, again, that $75 billion can be taken away at any point. Again, it’s set to expire in three and a half years now, in September 30th, 2029. And when that happens, if Congress doesn’t give them the money they need to keep this whole thing going, there will have to be mass layoffs. They can’t get that money elsewhere. They will have to cancel a bunch of detention contracts. They won’t have the capacity to do this. So if there is any silver lining, this mass deportation campaign, which as I said, if they want to actually carry this out, if they want to actually deport every undocumented immigrant, it’s going to take a decade or more, all of the wheels come off when that money goes away. And so, the next Congress has an enormous impact, and also who is in power in 2029.
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, that’s the key, the executive branch—
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
This is not inevitable.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, it’s not inevitable. On the other hand, it gives them even more incentive to do their best to make sure they can stay in power in 2029, which has all kinds of other implications, which gets to other possible things that ICE and that Border Patrol could be used for, which we should discuss at another time though, because I think that’s also an important issue.
Aaron, thanks so much. This has not been the most cheerful conversation we’ve ever had, but really important for people to understand, I think, what’s happening. You’ve really done a great job combining both the big picture with a level of granularity and detail and specificity that makes it so important to… It’s made this conversation, for me at least, very informative and I think important, I really do think so. So thank you for joining me today, and thank you for joining all of us today.
AARON REICHLIN-MELNICK:
Well, thank you for having me, and I’ll be happy to come back next year to talk this through again, see where we are then.
BILL KRISTOL:
Let’s see what happens with Congress and see also what happens with the courts and what happens, I guess, within the administration too over this next year. Thank you, Aaron, and thank all of you for joining us on Conversations.
