Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Melissa Gira Grant: Thanks, Greg.
Gira Grant: If you remember, there was a court hearing in which the judge verbally told the Department of Justice, the Trump administration, You cannot deport people right now to El Salvador. If there are planes in the air, turn them around. And lo and behold, there were planes in the air, and they didn’t turn them around. In fact, [they] joked about how they didn’t do that, made various excuses that don’t really hold any legal water like, Well, once the planes were in international waters, we can’t do that. None of this is credible. We’ve been waiting for the judge to weigh in because this was a pretty flagrant abuse of power. They came back and tried to say, Well, an order given verbally is not as strong as an order given in writing. I’m not surprised that this judge went as hard as they did in saying, We could actually hold you in criminal contempt, you have to comply with this court now, because what the Trump administration did here was so flagrant; [it’s] just treating the entire thing like it was a joke.
Sargent: For sure. And I think part of this is that the judge is commanding the administration to allow these Venezuelans a chance to defend themselves in court, correct?
Sargent: This all strikes me as a fiasco for Trump. You have the Supreme Court, which essentially ordered the administration to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia. The Supreme Court, however, is leaving itself a little wiggle room by saying, We don’t know whether this requires them to effectuate his return. Some people think the Supreme Court is setting itself up with a way to essentially let Trump get away with breaking the law at the end of the day. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but here James Boasberg—the judge who excoriated the administration—is clearly trying to force the issue, if somewhat carefully. He’s trying to force the administration to choose between open and outright defiance of the court and following the court. And neither of those options is good for Trump. Can you talk about that?
I feel like the courts are the last gasp here—and perhaps people pushing on the courts to get something that looks like an administration official admitting wrongdoing on the record, an opportunity to hold someone in contempt and potentially face charges for that. The hearing on Tuesday in Maryland in the Abrego Garcia case where you had enough people outside that the people inside the courtroom could hear them cheering for him and supporting him—that’s really important right now. Also, [it’s important] that the courts know that people are watching them, that the courts know that we expect this of them: to hold this administration accountable with whatever tools they have. Those things have to go hand in hand right now.
Chris Van Hollen (audio voiceover): So I asked the vice president: If Abrego Garcia has not committed a crime and the U.S. courts have found that he was illegally taken from the United States, and the government of El Salvador has no evidence that he was part of MS-13, why is El Salvador continuing to hold him in CECOT? And his answer was that the Trump administration is paying El Salvador, the government of El Salvador, to keep him at CECOT.
Gira Grant: It’s so honest it’s almost refreshing. It’s not that different than what we heard from Bukele, honestly, in the White House a few days ago. No one is pretending this is anything but the El Salvadorian administration doing [it at] the whim of Donald Trump. No one’s contesting that.
A lot of people are really scared, honestly, that something has happened to him, that that’s why he’s not being made available to people at the same time as we have Republicans going to that prison and posing for selfies—much as Kristi Noem, the DHS head, did in that horrible, horrible video. It’s telling that they are getting access to the prison to engage in that kind of propaganda, and the senator, when he just wants to know if this constituent is well, is being shut down.
Gira Grant: We can’t forget, just a couple of days ago, Bukele pushing back on the idea that he could return Abrego Garcia, saying, What am I supposed to do? Smuggle him into the United States? and telling press that the question they were asking him was “preposterous.” “We’re not fond of releasing terrorists into our country,” Bukele said. It’s theater up and down. I don’t know how much stock to put in where the vice president might be breaking from the president of El Salvador; I am not an expert on their internal politics. But just to have an American senator also delivering that news, I think, is really important right now.
Sargent: Right. A hundred percent. And that’s where some of the data comes in. Analyst G. Elliott Morris looked closely at some recent polling, and he found something interesting. While there’s public approval for Trump’s general handling of immigration, when you drill down into the specifics, you find something else. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll, large majority say Trump should follow court orders on these matters; 56 percent oppose continuing to deport people in defiance of courts. And critically, according to this analysis, poll also shows broad opposition to deporting undocumented immigrants who have lived here for more than 10 years or who haven’t broken any other laws or who have jobs here. This is striking stuff, Melissa. What’s at issue is whether we can get the public to see that those unpopular things are the stuff that Trump is doing. Can we talk about that?
And to be brutally honest, I think that that was not necessarily a bad call on his part because what were the Democrats saying in the lead up to the election? There was this sense that a harder line had to be taken on immigration, that the right thing to do is to lean into some of the things that Trump was saying about things being dangerous and needing to close the border. That’s a whole separate conversation on just where the Democrats have been out on immigration—but I think a way through this for them is like, Please just step that aside.
Sargent: A hundred percent. This is not about being tough versus not being tough. This is about an administration which is engaged in world historical levels of lawlessness, and Democrats can and should prosecute the case against that. This is why, by the way, it’s something of a fiasco for the judge to be forcing Trump’s hand on this. If he does push Trump to the point where he may decide to plunge us into the abyss and start defying the courts, it’s a catastrophe for them in the realm of public opinion. And that does matter because we are going to have an election next year, no matter what Trump has to say about it.
In the Abrego Garcia case, there are supposed to be daily updates being made in that court about what the administration is doing to bring him home. I don’t think that that is going to make the news unless we make it a huge story. Also, that is something that a resistance to Trump could seize on to keep that in the front of people’s minds: the lawlessness and the abuse of power. You can take for granted that’s probably going to be the story, unless we see a huge reversal. I don’t know.
Gira Grant: The way that Trump and the Department of Homeland Security, whether that’s Kristi Noem, DHS head, or the “border czar” Tom Homan, who officially lives within the realm of the executive branch, though, for all intents and purposes; he’s basically a one-man ICE show ... The two of them have gone out and personally appeared at ICE operations. It is very unusual, and I think the only reason that they are doing this is because they are being charged by Trump with producing the appearance of mass deportations whether or not they are capable of actually carrying out mass deportations.
Homan likes to talk about using the local police as a force multiplier for ICE agents because they don’t actually have enough manpower to go out and conduct mass deportations. They need other law enforcement on board. I look at this raid propaganda as a force multiplier on their plans for mass deportations. And just as importantly, people are turning the camera around on them. To your point of, Have they gone too far? what I immediately thought of was these videos we’re seeing now of ICE agents with balaclavas smashing the windows of people’s cars and yanking them out of their cars; or the video of the student in Boston who was taken away by masked men in an unmarked van. At a certain point, the power of images can also be very effective at putting the scrutiny back on them.
Sargent: So well said. I think the bottom line here is that the floor underneath their feet on this issue is a lot less secure than they think. Melissa Gira Grant, thanks so much for a great conversation.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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